


The Devil You Know

by Rastaban



Category: Splinter Cell (Video Games)
Genre: Down and Out in Donetsk, Fun with Drones, I Am Not Authorized To Have These Feelings, I Can't Be The Only Person Who Thought About This, M/M, Their Ship Name Is "Fishin" How Can You Not, Very OOC, i have no explanation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2769872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rastaban/pseuds/Rastaban
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Andriy Kobin is right now, nobody's quite sure. But when a mission on the Ukrainian border goes awry, Fourth Echelon is going to find out the hard way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Be Proactive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [patho (ghostsoldier)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostsoldier/gifts), [NeverwinterThistle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [The Devil You Know（Chinese version）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3505190) by [qingtan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qingtan/pseuds/qingtan)



> Okay. I really, honestly, do not know how this one happened. It started off as a mild interest and turned into stress venting and somehow became an actual story. Ditto for this pairing, which is a classic case of "it was just a joke I swear but now I'm super into it." I wasn't planning to post it since I haven't obsessed over it enough to satisfy my inner perfectionist, but then I thought to myself, "Self, I bet there is one other person out there who really ships these two without knowing why and they're going looking for fic right now and they are going to be disappointed just the way you were." So this one's for you, anonymous internet stranger. I'm here for you. We all gotta stick together.
> 
> This story is dedicated to patho and coco because they are enablers and they know what they did.

"I'm so sorry, sir. I thought you authorized it. I got a memo about it right here. I thought you must have signed off on it."

Amos looked helpless in front of the freight pallet that rested in the cargo bay just inside Paladin's ramp, shoving his tablet at Sam as if it could plead his case for him. Sam ignored it.

"We checked it over a dozen times," said Amos, turning to follow Sam as the Fourth Echelon commander walked over to the stacked cardboard boxes with a flat, closed expression. "There's nothing obviously dangerous on it. As far as we can tell, it's just..."

Sam picked up one of the ovoid yellow-orange shapes that filled the boxes.

"...Fruit," said Amos with a sigh.

Sam dropped the fruit back into the box and let his breath out slowly. When he turned back to the cargo chief his face was calm.

"They're persimmons," added Amos.

Sam's eyes narrowed a fraction.

"We, uh, no idea who sent them," said Amos hurriedly. "Well, I've got the freight company right here, and I've got the manifest for the fruit proper - there's a surprising amount of paperwork for produce import/export - but so far no leads on who sent it."

 _Grim should be handling this,_ thought Sam unhappily, watching Amos' anxious face. But at the moment Anna Grimsdottir was somewhere out in Singapore negotiating an intel swap with the local CIA bureau chief, Charlie was absolutely blissed-out on a grey-market electronics binge, and Briggs was out for some well-deserved R &R after two days straight lying awake and motionless on the stern of a cargo freighter, keeping his sniper rifle company while he waited for a particular ship to dock in Jakarta harbor. After a month living in each other's laps in Paladin's cramped quarters even the most dedicated team needed some time to themselves. So it was Sam's problem, now, that 48 cardboard boxes full of fruit - persimmons - had been delivered to Paladin's hangar without so much as a note. And they had done so well with their first three days off.

One hell of a fruit basket.

"Trash it," ordered Sam.

"Yessir." Amos called over one of the cargo handlers.

"Wait! Wait! Don't touch that! Don't fucking touch that!"

The source of the voice was running across Paladin's hangar waving his hands frantically in the air. About halfway across the tarmac he had to stop and breathe for a moment before continuing on at a much slower walk. By the time he reached the plane he had almost gotten his breath back.

"Kobin," said Sam flatly. "I should've known."

"Hey Fisher, nice to see you too," Andriy Kobin tossed over his shoulder as he walked over to the freight pallet. "How's your week off, you been practicing your death glare?" After reassuring himself of the pallet's integrity he turned and spotted Amos. "Did you touch this?" he demanded.

"Uh, well, no," stammered Amos.

"Good," snapped Kobin. "Get it inside the plane, you idiot, they're gonna go bad in the heat. I know we have a forklift around here somewhere."

"What the hell is this, Kobin," growled Sam.

"Easy, Fisher. Bring it inside, close the ramp and I'll show you."

"Why?"

"Cause I'd rather not show the whole fucking airport is why. Come on, man, it's an oven out here," wheedled Kobin. Sam glared at him for a moment longer, but he read only annoyance in Kobin's expression.

"Do it," he told Amos.

 _"Thank_ you," said Kobin, stalking up Paladin's ramp. Despite his pleas the converted C-147's cargo bay wasn't much cooler than the outside. Even so Kobin paced back and forth at the rear of the cargo bay, occasionally darting forward to harry Amos' cargo jockeys as they guided the pallet up the ramp. Sam leaned against the side of the plane and watched him move. Kobin had picked up a tropical outfit as soon as he'd hit the Singapore street malls, a purple shirt made of some light fabric worn open over a white tank and shorts that showed way more of his legs than Sam was sure anyone wanted to see, but even so a sheen of sweat glued the cloth to his skin and stuck his dark blond hair down to his skull. After four months hearing him complain it wasn't hard to figure out that Andriy didn't handle heat too well, but the size of his pupils and the tremor in his hands argued for a much more immediate, chemical reason.

Illegal stimulants, tension, and a slight measure of anxiety, concluded Sam, but not the sort of fear he knew would be there if Kobin were planning to make trouble.

The cargo ramp began to lift with a groan of hydraulics. The slab of steel rose back up towards the plane's tail, its shadow slowly covering the bay. When at last the shudder of the locks engaging rippled through the fuselage Kobin dashed to the pallet. He lifted one of the cardboard boxes of fruit off the top and set it down a short distance away, then returned for another.

"Little help here, Fisher?" he called over his shoulder. "It's gonna take a lot longer otherwise."

"Talk," barked Sam.

"Alright, alright. Well. So there I was in Singapore, with nothing to do and a pocket full of petty cash - thanks for that, by the way, glad to know I rate an allowance out of my own damn money - so I get to talking to a few folks, you know, we have some drinks, we have some good times, and lo and behold I find out there's a hell of a deal sitting down at the docks."

"You bought half a ton of fruit."

"See, Jakarta's totally locked down right now, because of the thing with the thing and Briggs shooting that guy, right, so not everyone can make their usual itinerary, and a cargo like this is gonna go sour in the meantime. They were looking to cut their losses and unload, I mean, they were already in the red on this, so I got it for an absolute steal, man, only five hundred. Gonna need to tap a couple more of my old accounts, by the way."

"You spent. Five hundred thousand dollars. On fruit."

"First of all, these are not _fruit,"_ snapped Kobin. He brandished one of the pale orange globes like a grenade. _"These_ are Hyakume varietal brown sugar persimmons, hard to find in Japan and impossible to get outside of it, and I just scored a clean half-ton. And second..." Kobin leaned over and pushed aside more fruit to expose the last layer of cardboard boxes.

Except that it wasn't cardboard underneath, it was matte steel, with a small glass square set into the center. Kobin started clearing off the rest of the second layer, and this time Sam moved to help. The flat metal container occupied the entire middle of the cargo pallet, measuring about a meter on each side.

 _"Second_ of all," continued Kobin as they cleared away the boxes, slightly breathless, "I spent five hundred thousand dollars on _this."_

Kobin pressed his left thumb against the glass square. A white light flashed across his skin, then turned green. Something rattled and clicked deep within the box and the entire top lifted up a centimeter. Kobin grabbed the edge and pushed it up further on trim folding hinges. The lid swung to one side to reveal a deep foam-lined recess and within it a precise and brilliant assemblage of polygonal pieces, all painted a sleek matte white, like some great shattered ceramic whose shards had been neatly repackaged.

Kobin backed off to lean against the side of the chopper, smirking, tossing a persimmon up and down. Sam knelt to inspect the disassembled drone. He didn't recognize the model, but the exquisite craftsmanship was obvious. He brushed his fingers along one segmented wing: machined titanium beneath, some texture he couldn't identify over top. Explosive rounds the size of fat crayons lay in a neat row in the foam. Despite himself he gave a long, thoughtful whistle.

"Merry fuckin' Christmas, Fisher," said Kobin with a smug grin, and bit into the fruit.

* * *

 _"Is that an RQ-275 adaptive-camo dual-mode tactical combat drone!?"_ shrieked Charlie when Sam managed to distract him from the piles of new integrated circuits that covered his workbenches. "Oh my god oh my god oh my _god!"_

 "It's a good model, then," said Sam.

"Holy shit are you kidding? Holy _shit,"_ whispered Charlie reverently. He tore his gaze away long enough to look up and say, "Sam, this is Mossad hardware. It can hover, it can do forward flight, the onboard algorithms are killer. The whole thing is covered in low-power fast-response OLED panels! This is, like - this is beyond cutting-edge. CIA isn't even sure they _exist_ yet." He stared into the case with a rapturous expression. "Who'd you have to kill to get it?"

Sam frowned. "Kobin bought it," he muttered finally.

"Kobie got one of these!?" blurted Charlie incredulously. "How in the _fuck."_

"He ran off with five hundred thousand in cash and came back with it stashed in a fruit box. Said something about someone not being able to make their intended destination." Charlie wasn't listening anymore, tracing the line of a wing with one finger.

"How long before you can get it into the loadout?" prompted Sam.

"Oh, right, uh. Well, I'll have to hang on to it for a couple of weeks, you know, interface it to the OPSAT, test everything out, but... Should be ready to go for overwatch, urban combat, whatever you need, I mean, this baby can do it _all."_

"Good. Keep me posted." Charlie didn't even bother to respond.

* * *

Sam was digging through all the email he'd managed to avoid in Jakarta when he heard the tread of Grim's boots returning. She tossed a satisfyingly heavy duffel onto her ops console, then spotted Sam.

"Why is there a half-ton of fruit in the cargo bay?" she asked.

"They're persimmons," said Sam absently. "Kobin went shopping."

"He's in the fruit business now?"

"He's in his usual business. The persimmons are just a cover." _I think._ After Kobin had staggered off to crew quarters with a carton of fruit under his arm to shower and sleep off whatever chemical was percolating through his bloodstream, Sam had snuck one himself. Now he had five of the golden fruit wrapped up in a napkin.

"And...we've started sending him shopping." The edge in Grim's voice promised consequences if he'd made that kind of decision without informing her.

Sam saved the most recent draft and spun his chair to face her. "He seems to have done it on his own dime."

Grim looked nonplussed. "Why?"

"Not sure yet," said Sam thoughtfully.

"Could be a trap." Grim sat on the edge of her console, mulling it over. "Or he could still be worried we're going to give him back to CIA."

"You and I both know the only way he's leaving Fourth Echelon is in a box." Sam crossed his arms. "I don't trust anyone else not to let him weasel out of custody."

 _"We_ do, sure, but _he_ may not know that yet," said Grim. "Or, he did it because he's Kobin, and he's insane."

"Either way, he did it. Even seems to have made a good buy."

Grim snorted in amusement. "I assume we're not just taking his word for it."

"Charlie's checking over the merch right now. But so far it looks legit."

"He got something worthwhile?"

"An RQ-275 Mossad tactical drone, if Charlie's correct."

Grim's eyebrows shot up. "Are you serious? CIA isn't even sure those exist yet."

"That's pretty much what Charlie said."

"How the hell did Kobin get his hands on one?"

"He didn't give too many details. I'll press him when he sobers up."

Grim shook her head in weary disgust. "Singapore's got the death penalty for drug possession. How does he keep finding shit to shove up his nose?"

"Same way he found a Mossad drone."

Grim sighed. "At least we shouldn't need him in the cockpit anytime soon. Speaking of which, now would be a good time to catch some shut-eye, Sam. The CIA courier shows up in four hours and I'm fairly certain we're going to have to move on what he's got."

"You know what it's about?"

"Loose tech in former Soviet satellites. Centrifuges to enrich nuclear material. CIA thinks a Red Army unit's auctioning them off to the highest bidder."

"We can't take out Red Army personnel quietly."

"We don't have to. Centrifuge technology is highly sensitive. A little light sabotage and the buyers will get way more than they bargained for."

"Then why are we handling this? We're not CIA's errand boys."

"Relations with the Russians aren't good right now. If a CIA team got caught we'd have a serious incident on our hands."

"Then they should try not to get caught."

"Sam. We're still in CIA's bad books after Blacklist. Hell, we're in everybody's bad books. If Fourth Echelon is going to survive as a permanent team, we need intelligence relationships, and that means that sometimes you have to be nice to people you don't like."

"Still doesn't explain why us."

"We're deniable. As usual." A frown scored Grim's face that hadn't been there when she'd left to meet the Company's representative. "Get some rack time, Sam. I'll have options ready by the time you're back."

"Thanks. Oh, and Grim. Try the persimmons." He tossed her one; Grim caught it one-handed.

"Like an apple," he added when she stared at it in puzzlement. Grim gave him a skeptical look, but took a bite. Instantly her expression slid into surprise.

"Damn," she said, and took another bite of the sweet brown flesh inside.

"Pace yourself," said Sam. "We've got half a ton to go through."

* * *

The CIA courier arrived five hours later, and half an hour after that Sam's radio trilled. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and tapped the skin behind his left ear. 

 _"Briefing in ten,"_ Grim told him.

"On my way."

_"Get Kobin while you're up there."_

"Will do." Sam cut the connection and started looking for clean clothes.

He banged on Kobin's door five minutes later and declared, "Briefing. Put on something normal."

No response. Sam sighed and not for the first time cursed the fact that Charlie still hadn't had the time to make a sufficiently crippled smartphone to trust Kobin with it. For that matter, life would be a lot easier if they'd kept Kobin in the holding cell like he'd intended. But then there was Kasperov, and they had to lock that psycho Russian up somewhere, so Kobin had found himself an open bunk and it had just...never really seemed like the time to kick him back out.

Silence from inside the room. He banged on the door again and was just about to go in and haul the man out of bed by force when one of the crew members who shared the hallway stuck her head out and said, "Commander? You looking for Kobie?"

"Yeah. You seen him?"

"Infirmary."

Sam's brows knit together. "He sick?"

"Found him passed out in the hallway, sir. Addison took him down to the doc."

"Thanks."

The woman nodded and withdrew back into her room.

"Grim, Kobin's in the med bay," radioed Sam as he walked back towards the ladder to main deck. "Let's just do this without him."

_"Sorry, Sam. He's got a hand in this one."_

"Alright. There in a bit."

As he descended the ladder Sam racked his brain for the woman's name. Maers, he ultimately decided; her name was Maers, and she flew the helo. He had managed to learn the names of all the primary crewmembers that kept Paladin functioning - Dr. Nozumi, in the infirmary, Amos the supply chief, Gabrielova, who kept everyone fed, and Ollie, of course, without whom Fourth Echelon would probably collapse - but the ten supplementary crew continually evaded his memory. Grim probably knew the entire life stories of her three intel coordinators, but the rest - Amos' two supplymasters, the pair of dedicated mechanics who doubled as armorers, Maers the helo pilot, and the three Paladin pilots -

 _Two Paladin pilots,_ he reminded himself. Rosen had wanted off after the near-disastrous viral systems crash during Blacklist. Escalona was this close to quitting, too. Sam had blamed the high pilot turnover on Paladin's constant travel, but Ollie said Escalona was just sick of dealing with Kobin in the cockpit. Apparently he'd gotten more than a little possessive of the aircraft. Sam ought to talk to him about that. Later, though. Right now there was a mission.

"What happened?" asked Sam as he came into the infirmary.

Noboru Nozumi looked up from his tablet. He hadn't bothered to change into his scrubs, so it couldn't be serious. "Kobin? Passed out in the hall. Somebody heard him hit the deck, brought him down here." He jerked a thumb towards the far corner of the infirmary. "Still out of it."

"Damage?"

Nozumi shrugged. "Nasty bruise but no concussion. Heat stroke. Just the drugs again."

 _Great._ "What was it this time?"

"Coke and an amazing quantity of alcohol. I mean a truly staggering amount. I don't even know how he got back to the plane. I had to ice-pack him to get his core temperature down to a human level. Right now I got him on saline for the hangover and nitrates for his blood pressure."

"That's it?"

"Cocaine clears the blood fast. If he were anyone else I'd add a little diazepam, but with Andriy's tolerance it wouldn't do shit."

"Thanks, doc. Mind giving us a minute?"

"He's all yours." Nozumi slotted the tablet back into the med bay's mainframe interface and headed out the door. "When he wakes up, tell him to quit doing stimulants in hundred-degree weather. Next time he's gonna do worse than pass out."

Sam went back to the bed Nozumi had indicated. Kobin lay crashed out under a thin blanket, looking pale as his hospital gown. Sam stood next to the bed and drummed his fingers on the metal railing. After four months on Paladin without access to hair gel, most drugs, and dubious accessories, Kobin almost looked like a responsible adult. If you ignored the giant grey-shaded snake tattoo that wound across his collarbone, at least.

"Up and at it," ordered Sam.

Kobin stirred and groaned. He rolled to one side and pulled the pillow over his face. "Fuck off," he rasped.

"We've got a briefing."

"Go jump out the cargo bay."

Sam whipped the thin blanket off him in one quick motion.

"Agh, what the hell!" barked Kobin. He curled up reflexively in the cold air.

"I _said,_ we have a briefing."

Kobin tried to reach for the blanket, but only got a few inches before he moaned in pain and dropped back onto the bed. "God, Fisher, don't you have a standing offer to shoot me? Because right now I'd really like to take you up on that."

"Believe me, no one's sadder than I am that I have to decline."

Kobin pulled the pillow more firmly across his head. "No more coke. Last time. I can't do this shit anymore."

"Pretty sure that's what you said in Buenos Aires. And Mexico City. And Halifax." Sam had honestly never thought Canadian cities had enough illegal substances to get that high.

"I mean it this time. I don't care who it is. I'm not doing it ever again."

"We'll take you to a 12-step group."

"This isn't fucking funny, Fisher."

Sam tossed the blanket onto another bed and found Kobin's ridiculous purple shirt and shorts neatly folded on the med bay's shelves. He chucked them at Kobin's head, still buried under the pillow. "Get dressed."

"I repeat my invitation to take a flying leap out the back of the plane."

"Hey, I got an idea. Stop doing so many damn drugs."

"Fuck you, man, you ever try to cut a deal like this?"

"Dress, or you're coming to ops in your med gown."

Kobin curled up tighter on the bed. "At least turn those damn lights off," he pleaded.

Sam rolled his eyes, but he found the med bay light switch and turned off the overheads. The pillow moved and Kobin emerged. Hazel eyes swam in a sea of pink veins. Sam glared at him until the man grabbed the clothes, then turned his back and leaned in the doorway.

"It's about trust, Fisher," said Kobin over the rustle of cloth, calmer now. "People trust you if you get fucked up with them. A guy offers you a bump, it's fuckin' rude not to. That's all it takes to kill a deal." A zipper closed. "Alright." Sam turned. Kobin had made it to the edge of the bed, fully clothed, but his shoulders sagged and he looked as though standing up were about as likely as sprouting wings and flying away.

"I hate coke," he muttered. "It makes you _itch."_

"You didn't seem to have a problem with it in Malta."

"Had to be alert, you know. Stay sharp in case someone was coming after me. Which someone _was,"_ he added with a pointed look in Sam's direction. "Now I stay clean for a few weeks then bam, all-nighter. And I wake up feeling like this." He buried his face in his hands, rubbing at his forehead. "No more coke, man. Never again."

"We'll see how long that lasts." Sam moved out of the doorway. "After you."

Kobin glared at him, but he didn't have the energy to keep arguing. He pulled out the IVs with a wince, got to his feet and emerged into the hallway, blinking in the light.

"On the bright side, I think you just made Charlie's year with that drone," said Sam as they started towards ops.

"Yeah?" Kobin perked up. "At least one person on this damn plane appreciates me."

"How'd you get ahold of it?"

"Like I told you, pretty much. Somebody picked it up, sold it to somebody else, they gave it to this cargo guy to take on his regular route. Then Jakarta gets locked down and he's left sitting dockside with the Singapore harbor police crawling all over. And you don't even wanna _know_ what they do to you here if you get caught with hardware. He was desperate to get it off his ship, had no idea what it was worth. I probably coulda talked him down to four."

"So there's a buyer out there who's not going to get his extremely expensive drone."

"Yup."

"He's going to be pretty unhappy when it's missing."

"I sure would be."

"This doesn't concern you?"

"Cargo guy's problem." A door slammed somewhere and Kobin winced. "Not feeling too sympathetic."

They entered the center of Paladin's long fuselage, full of long shadows and thin beams of light from the portholes high on the sides. The ops center at the core of it glowed in shades of white and green above the swamp of cables and equipment.

"Sorry for the delay," said Sam as he entered. Charlie and Briggs had already assembled around the SMI and Grim was standing at its head paging through her tablet. Behind him he heard Kobin stagger up onto the raised decking and immediately drop into one of the high-backed console chairs. "What've you got for us?"

"Novouralsk," said Grim. She pulled up a satellite image of the city and focused in on a cluster of buildings near its outskirts. "Specifically, a Red Army unit stationed there. The town is one of Russia's four uranium enrichment facilities and the headquarters of the company that makes its next-generation separation centrifuges. CIA thinks the army unit swapped out some of the new stock and they're about to sell it off to the highest bidder."

"Why isn't CIA handling this?" asked Charlie.

"The Russians are jumpy. Last thing we want to do is spook the hardliners," answered Sam. "We're deniable."

"More or less," said Grim. "They suspect about thirty centrifuges have been stolen. CIA doesn't know yet who's going to win the auction, but anyone with an interest in that equipment is someone we want to keep an eye on. They want us to sabotage them and plant trackers inside."

"Do we know where they're being held?" asked Briggs.

"They've been moved as far as the Ukrainian border crossing. CIA forwarded the site intel." Grim tapped the glowing surface of the SMI to bring up satellite images of a small base, a scatter of buildings next to a crude airstrip. "We're putting together infil routes now. Sam, there's a technical brief for you and Briggs on how to disable the centrifuges. I've already forwarded it to your terminals."

A careful sweep of Grim's hand dismissed the satellite images and brought up another map, this time a network of nodes labeled with the names of major banks. "Charlie, Kobin, you guys have another job to do. We need hard evidence of the money being transferred into the group's account."

"Why?" said Charlie.

"Because we can't kill a Red Army colonel on Russian soil," said Sam. "We need evidence that the State Department can wave in the Russians' faces to prove that they were being very bad men."

"So you're going to be getting it. Charlie, you'll hack whatever banks they use for the transfer," said Grim. She slid her graph of financial networks over to him and Charlie swept it up onto his own tablet. "Kobin," she said, turning to where he slouched in his chair with a glazed expression. At the sound of his name he refocused for a moment, looked up. "You know how to hide money. Once Charlie gets you in, it's your job to follow it."

Kobin nodded, but said nothing more.

"Alright," said Sam, standing up from the SMI. "Grim, Briggs, let's work out a ground plan. I assume we can't use Russian airstrips, so we'll have to set down in Ukraine." Grim nodded "How long till we get there?"

"Eight hours or so. I have Ollie finding us a hangar."

"Excellent."

"Where in Ukraine?" Everyone started slightly at the sound of Kobin's voice.

Grim recovered first. "Most likely Donetsk," she told him. "CIA thinks the centrifuges will cross the border there by convoy. Then they head south to Sevastopol and ship out."

She paused, waiting for a reply. But Kobin only nodded again and returned to whatever dazed prospect was unfolding in his head.

"Okay," said Grim after an awkward moment. "Any other questions? Then let's get to work."


	2. Begin With The End In Mind

Ukraine wasn't much cooler than Singapore, and the food was worse.

All of Paladin sweated in the high heat. Walls groaned as the fuselage expanded. Refrigerators and freezers buzzed unhappily. The ops center labored like a panting beast as every fan and cooling pump strained against the thermal gradient.

"I've pulled enough chatter to get a rough schedule," said Charlie. He flicked his fingers across his tablet to display a web of calls between various phone numbers associated with their Red Army targets. "The auction's been open for a week now, but they're definitely taking the final bids tomorrow."

"When tomorrow?" asked Grim.

"Fifteen-hundred, is what I got."

"Fifteen hundred hours local?" asked Briggs.

"Uh..."

"Zulu," said Kobin, tapping his fingers on the edge of the SMI. A few days' rest in transit had replenished his manic energy, but he had been positively mute compared to his normal self. "It's always Zulu. Only timezone everyone can agree on."

"Zulu, then," said Grim. "That's...two hours off. So Wednesday at seventeen hundred hours local."

"Quittin' time," said Charlie. "I guess even criminals like to go home early."

"We have the results from another satellite pass. Based on the state of preparations, they're most likely going to move the convoy out early in the day after."

"They're not moving in the dark?"

"Satellites show the whole thing's been dressed up like a Red Army convoy," said Grim. "Presumably they've already bribed the right people, so customs and borders won't be a problem."

"So tomorrow night is our best window," concluded Briggs.

"When the auction's over, they might drop their guard," said Grim.

"When the auction is over they're going to get completely shit-faced," opined Kobin. He leaned across the surface of the SMI. "These guys aren't pros, they're conscripts who got sick of being posted to the ass-end of nowhere. I guarantee you the second the cash hits their account every one of them is gonna be too drunk to stand."

"We go Wednesday night," said Sam. "Briggs, we'll have to move out early to make it to that base in time."

"We can take the chopper," said Briggs. "Fly out before dawn. There's plenty of open space to set it down."

"Check the satellite photos, get us an LZ that's well out of visual and auditory range," ordered Sam. "Charlie, how long do you need to get the taps set up?"

"An hour, maybe?" guessed Charlie. "It's only like 20 banks or so. I've got backdoors into half of them already."

"Good. Try to be ready ahead of schedule. If we get lucky we might be able to ID some of the bidders as well. Kobin. What do you need?"

"Charlie's feeds," said Kobin with a shrug, but then his eyes lit up. "Can I use the SMI?"

"What? Why?" asked Grim.

"It's just - it's really cool." Kobin trailed his fingers on the glass surface with an adoring grin. Little icons followed his touch.

"No," said Sam firmly. "Try again."

Kobin's grin turned into a huff. "Fine. The things, and one of those yellow pads of paper, I don't remember the English name. The big ones? With the long pages?"

"Legal pads?" said Grim.

"That's it," said Kobin, snapping his fingers. "I need one of those. And a pen."

"You want a notepad," said Sam.

"I'm an analog guy."

"But you just..." Charlie trailed off. Sam could practically see him do the math and come up with _Not worth it._

"We'll see what we can do," said Grim, completely calm. One eyebrow twitched.

* * *

Ollie found him a legal pad. Grim still wasn't sure how he'd done it.

A clock on the overhead display counted down to 1500h Zulu time. Charlie had patched through the last of the financial feeds half an hour ago and had already gotten bored.

"Twenty mil bid has to be the Iranians," he called from his console.

"No way," countered Kobin from his. "No way they are buying from an outside source after Stuxnet. Hey, look at this - somebody just paid out five from the Brazilian economic development minister's account."

"Wow. Pretty hefty for a bribe."

"I bet blackmail. Dude has, like, ten girls on the side."

Grim leaned on the SMI and silently rubbed her temples. Kobin's odd silence had worn off as he and Charlie approached the critical moment and she desperately wished for it back.

The console beeped under her elbows. Ten minutes till the auction closed.

"Traffic's starting to heat up," warned Charlie.

"Up to twenty-five," reported Kobin. "Thirty - thirty-one - thirty-one-five, seriously, you cheap-ass son of a bitch - wow, forty, someone has a lot tied up here."

"Five minutes," noted Grim.

"I'm seeing a lot of dummy accounts opening in Eastern European sites," said Charlie.

"Forty-five mil," said Kobin. "No, fifty. Shit. These must be nice machines."

"Shifting over to the usual offshore haunts."

"Fifty-five. Fifty-six. Fifty-six going once, fifty-six going twice - fifty-seven - fifty-seven going...going... _Sold!"_ Kobin flung his hands up in the air as gleefully as if he'd made the sale himself.

"Kobie, you're live," called Charlie.

"And we're off!" Kobin shouted happily. He typed rapidly, dragging boxes across his screen, then stopped and scribbled on the legal pad for a long minute.

"Tahiti," he ordered. A slew of new windows opened up. "Wow." He shook his head in dismay. "Yikes, you guys, this is just depressing. This is fuckin' amateur hour."

"Kobin," warned Grim. "Do you have it."

"Yeah, I got it, 'cause I'm not _blind,"_ said Kobin. "They took the cash out of escrow, split it into one-mil chunks, bounced it around two offshores, pulled it back out through Tahiti and straight into a Swiss. Half now, half on delivery. Might as well have just paged the NSA." He wrote a few more notes on the legal pad, then ripped off the top page and held it out. "That's the account it ended up in, plus everywhere it went in the meantime."

Grim took the page. Indecipherable Cyrillic scrawl covered the top half, but the list of names and numbers at the bottom was clear enough.

"Good work," she said, folding the page and putting it in her pocket. "I'll have NSA pull together the records of all activity on these numbers to give Charlie some cover."

"The world will never know my genius," the tech mourned.

"You and me both, kid," said Kobin.

"In the meantime, Kobin, recognize any of these?"

"Oh, yeah, 'cause most people just bid on illegal nuclear equipment with their checking accounts," said Kobin.

"I can get you partway through the proxy chain," offered Charlie. "You're gonna have to wait if you want confirmation, though."

"Really? Yeah, patch that through," said Kobin, waving a hand towards his screen. "Everybody does their proxies differently."

Complex networks opened on his screen. Kobin traced one or two with the end of his pen, then began tapping it back and forth on the console.

"One of these is from Argentina," he said at last. "This one is definitely Ukrainian mob - jeez, are they still using that? I think _I_ set that up. One of them is coming through France. The rest of them I don't know. Probably intermediaries. You're gonna have a tricky time tracing back to a specific customer."

"They're using cutouts," said Grim.

"Most places don't keep a real dealmaker on staff," said Kobin. "It's a damn complicated business. To buy something like this they'd get in touch with someone like me, tell me what they want to spend. I go out and get the merchandise, charge a commission on top, pass it along."

"Who won?" asked Charlie. "Their trace is on your screen."

Kobin turned back to the monitor and frowned, chewing on his lower lip as he thought.

"Don't know," he said. "That's a lot of hops." He thought it over some more. "Southeast Asia," he guessed at last.

"Who?" asked Grim.

"Whoever took over my clients, I imagine," said Kobin. "Wait, this one here." He flipped through windows. "That's an embarrassingly blatant attempt by the SVR to buy them back and cover up this whole little incident." Kobin turned in his chair. "The Russian government knows about the theft."

"You're certain," asked Grim.

"Yeah."

"You're _absolutely_ certain," pressed Grim.

"Yes, I'm fucking certain!" snapped Kobin. "Because I am, actually, good at my job!"

The ops center went silent. The unexpected outburst rattled off the distant fuselage in a trail of echoes. Kobin turned back to his monitor and steadfastly ignored everything around him.

Behind him the SMI chirped and a faint hiss of static came from the speakers. "Sam, Briggs, the auction's done," called Grim out over the radio link. "We've got the money trail. You're clear to tag the equipment."

 _"Roger,"_ came Sam's voice over the SMI's speakers. _"Three hours till dark. We'll move then."_

"I'll retask some IR satellites to give you support," said Grim. "Till then, stay put."

Sam closed the connection.

"I wonder what they do for so long out there," said Charlie.

"Word jumbles," guessed Kobin. The sudden anger had dissipated without a trace. "Maybe one of those, like, spot the difference pictures. I bet Fisher's good at that."

"We're done here," said Grim loudly. Her fingers danced over the glass, already summoning up satellite orbits. "Charlie, you're on for tonight, I recommend catching a nap if you can. I'll wake you up if anything develops."

"Do you even sleep, Grim?" asked Charlie.

"Nah, man, the Ice Queen just plugs into her charger," said Kobin with a smirk. Grim ignored him. "I'm going to go take a nap too, in case anyone cares," he declared loudly.

Charlie wandered off to his loft, already yawning. Grim hoped he would make it back to his niche in the crew quarters, but it was a lot more likely she'd find him curled up in the sleeping bag under his workbench when it was time. By the time she looked back, Kobin had already disappeared up the ladder.

Then somewhere in Paladin's corridors she heard him start to whistle: _Oh there ain't no rest for the wicked…_

* * *

"Define 'not here.' "

_"It's a pretty self-explanatory phrase."_

"Could they have been moved to another part of the base?"

 _"We checked,"_ said Briggs. He sounded harassed. _"We've checked every space large enough to hold that much equipment. The centrifuges have already left."_

 _"There are footprints and tire tracks everywhere,"_ reported Sam. _"The base is down to a skeleton crew. Face it, Grim. We missed the convoy."_

"Dammit," hissed Grim, resisting the urge to smack the SMI's surface. "The border's huge. They could have crossed anywhere," she said over the line. "It'll take days to search all the traffic."

 _"Somebody around here probably knows,"_ suggested Briggs.

"We ask and we alert them. Leave it as a last resort," said Grim. "Find a laptop. Maybe we'll get lucky and someone wrote it down."

_"Will do."_

Thirty minutes later Charlie was staring at his screens and laughing.

 _"I hope that means good news,"_ said Sam, in an emphatically unamused voice.

"Yeah, no, I just..." Charlie took a deep breath and wiped his eyes. "Man, Kobie was right. Fucking amateur hour here. Would you believe some idiot Googled for directions?"

Silence in the ops center, except for Charlie's choked-off giggling.

"Wow," said Grim finally.

 _"Okay,"_ said Sam. _"So we're not dealing with your hardened criminals."_

"Not so much, no," squeaked out Charlie. "The search was run at around 1100h this morning, so the convoy probably moved out a few hours later."

"They're pretty confident in their disguise," said Grim.

 _"Or they just didn't think of it,"_ said Briggs.

"Anyway, the first destination on this map is about eight hours' drive into Ukraine," announced Charlie. "So if they're traveling during the day, they've probably stopped for the night by now."

 _"We could hit them tonight,"_ said Briggs. _"Wait. Shit."_ Charlie had just uploaded the destination to their OPSATs. The convoy had taken a sharp left turn to the south.

 _"Yeah. No way we're making it there before dawn,"_ said Sam. _"Okay. Options?"_

"I'll put a satellite on them ASAP," said Grim. "They're probably moving through areas where they know they have allies. We can track them and extrapolate likely stopovers from there."

"I'll see if I can catch any cell or satphone transmissions from that area," said Charlie.

Grim was drawing calculations on the SMI. "Based on the rate of travel, they can't have much more than beat-up Army trucks. It'll take them days to make it to Sevastopol. We'll have plenty of chances to get this op done."

 _"Good. We'll return to base for the night. The convoy's only going to move closer to us,"_ said Sam.

"Roger that," said Grim. "Come on home."

* * *

Sam awoke Thursday morning around seven AM local time, still feeling stiff in every joint but eager for tonight. The first attempt to recover the machines had involved a lot of holding still while loudly intoxicated soldiers stumbled about rather than anything in the way of real danger. But even so, he was running on about four hours of sleep, and he swallowed the first of what he knew would be several stimulant tablets before he left the room. The forward deck was quiet, although the ops center hummed with activity as usual. He detoured around it and headed aft to where the small gym sat next to the med bay.

But after fifteen minutes of beating up on the bag he still couldn't dispel the anxiety that dusted his thoughts. Where were the centrifuges? Where their targets really as stupid as they looked, or was this another ruse on the scale of Sadiq's, another trap to draw them into chasing dangerously false leads? What did the Russian government know? Did they have a hand in it? Was he leading his team into another ambush, this one fatal?

He pushed and pulled on each of the machines in turn, straining every set of muscles, but the questions did not abate. He needed a run. Running always cleared his thoughts, left worries behind. Running around outside in the city wasn't a great idea, but they'd managed to find a hangar to hide Paladin from eyes in the sky. The sun hadn't yet heated the day to unbearable levels. He could take a few laps around the cavernous interior.

When he pulled open the massive pressure hatch that led to the cargo bay, though, he discovered he was not alone. Kobin had perched in the open door of the helo and sat, silent, looking out the back of the plane. Smoke curled from the cigarette he held between the fingers of his left hand. Out in the cargo bay to dodge Paladin's air filters, then. Sam frowned, standing in the doorway. He had hoped he would be the only person around, that he could run in peace and work through his thoughts.

Kobin dragged on his cigarette and stared off at the huge hangar doors. Since Singapore he had changed his outfit for dark pants and a collared white shirt with elaborate red patterns embroidered across it. It looked familiar, but Sam couldn't place it. One leg swung back and forth below the ledge, bleeding off his energy in constant motion. He had a black satchel slung over one shoulder and resting by his side.

The door crashed shut behind him. Kobin looked up and over, startled.

"Really, Fisher?" he called, sounding exhausted. "I can't get, like, ten minutes to myself?"

The words were familiar, but Kobin's whining didn't have its usual bite; and after a moment the man looked away and pulled on the cigarette again. That annoyed Sam on a deeper level than he cared to examine, so that he strode forward till he was level with the helo's door.

"Going out for a stroll?" he asked.

Kobin jerked upright this time, not just surprised that Sam had spoken but for one small second genuinely spooked. He covered it with a lazy stretch, but then hazel eyes narrowed and instead of the sarcastic retort Sam was expecting he snapped, "None of your goddamned business."

Sam stiffened. "We're in hostile territory on a clandestine operation. And you're forgetting that I don't trust you any further than I can throw this plane."

He expected insults, complaining, even perhaps some weary resignation in response. What he did not expect was for Kobin to flick the cigarette to the deck, push himself off the ledge in one quick motion, and declare, "Oh, fuck you, Fisher. Just...fuck you."

"Someone didn't get their orange juice this morning," retorted Sam instinctively, while the rest of him tried to sort out what was happening right now.

"I fucking _mean_ it, asshole," and Kobin took a step forward. Anger burned in his voice and twitched Sam's instincts into a fighting stance before he'd even processed the thought; not the coked-up insanity that usually floated to the surface but a pure deep fury that blazed in his eyes. "I'm done listening to you insult me," he spat. "I worked for Third fucking Echelon just as long as you. Cleaning up after _your_ goddamned messes."

"Like I ever made a deal with a professional dirtbag like you."

"You ever think about what has to happen after you leave the scene?" Kobin demanded. "Who clears away the bodies, pays the police to look the other way, gets you your informants?" He scoffed. "God, do I ever hate guys like you. You think you're so noble. Well, that's because you have guys like me to do the real dirty work, so you can go home at night with clean hands and tell yourself you're saving the world."

"You'd better count yourself lucky that I think I'm so noble, or I'd have left your corpse in DC." _What the hell is happening right now?_ piped up a corner of his mind.

"Oh, god, this again," said Kobin, rolling his eyes. "Yeah, Fisher, I faked your daughter's death. I didn't want to; I didn't care! _It was just a job_. Irving Lambert paid me to do it because he thought that if something actually happened you would go straight into fucked-up psycho berserker mode. And hey! He was right."

"Don't you dare talk about Irving Lambert," hissed Sam.

Kobin didn't so much as flinch. _"Irving Lambert_ paid me to take the jobs that he was too self-righteous to touch, and then he called me scum for doing them. You assholes think good intentions make you exempt from judgement. You may have the freedom to break the law, Fisher, but that doesn't mean you're not a criminal. It doesn't make you any better than me." He was right up in front of Sam now, still refusing to back down, staring him in the eye from inches away. It was, thought Sam all of a sudden, the closest they had ever been without one of them hitting the other.

"I sell guns, you slit guys' throats in the middle of the night," Kobin hissed. "I think. We're fucking. _Even."_

"Maybe I do," said Sam, calm and even. "Except the difference is that I give a damn about someone besides myself."

Kobin was still standing there, unfazed, unconcerned. It made no sense to the ancient, hunting part of his brain. It felt like seeing the mouse stare down the cat. "Right, I forgot. You're allowed to be a psycho killer because you do it for your country. Don't kid yourself, Fisher, that flag on your shoulder's just an excuse to do what you already want to."

"What the fuck would you know about anything like duty--"

"Oh don't even try it. Don't lie to me, Fisher. I'm the only person on this plane you don't have to lie to, 'cause I already know what you are."

"And I know what you are, Kobin. You're a gutless coward, a spineless sack of shit. You'd spill every secret you've got just to stay alive. You'd sell your own mother out for--"

 _"You don't know jack shit about me!"_ screamed Kobin.

"You know, maybe you're right. Maybe I'm some violent vigilante. Maybe I should just kill whoever I want."

Kobin's voice dropped to a low, firm growl like a serrated edge. "You know what? Do it."

Sam blinked.

Kobin backed up a step and flung his arms wide. "Fucking do it, Fisher, I don't care anymore!" he shouted. "You threaten someone with death every other day and it gets a little old." Hysteria veined his voice. "I'll take whatever you've got to dish out over waking up every morning wondering if today's the day you decide I'm not _useful_ anymore. I'm done with being afraid of you. So if you're gonna do it, _just fucking do it!"_

Sam didn't move a muscle; only stared, eyes wide.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," said Kobin, dropping his arms. "Fuck this," he spat. "Just - fuck all of this."

He stormed down the cargo ramp and straight towards the hangar doors, vanishing into the expanse beyond.

Sam ran for an hour round and round inside the hangar before he finally gave up and went to prep his gear.

* * *

"We're at the entrypoint of infil route Bravo," murmured Briggs to his radio.

 _"Copy that,"_ Grim crackled over the line.

The convoy had, literally, circled the wagons. When the Red Army soldiers had stopped for the night the jeeps and trucks had been driven off the road and pulled up into a circle with the men gathered around camp stoves in the center. The gas flames neatly blinded them to any approaching figures and created plenty of lovely shadows to move through. It was almost a walk in the park.

Almost. There was just one tiny complication.

"Grim, I counted thirty trucks and ten jeeps on the way in here."

"Twenty trucks on my side," chimed in Briggs.

 _"Most of them are probably empty,"_ said Grim. _"Some of them must be transporting people, too."_

"Still." That was a lot of trucks.

They crept to the back of the first transport truck. Briggs climbed onto the roof of the next one to cover the area while Sam eased open the latches and moved one of the doors open far enough to slip inside.

Sam stuck his head back out of the truck. "There are fifteen centrifuges in here."

 _"That's it,"_ said Grim. _"CIA says there are about thirty total."_

Then Briggs radioed in from two trucks away. _"I've got fifteen in here, too."_

Sam frowned. "What are the odds that we pick the two correct trucks out of fifty?"

 _"Four percent,"_ said Charlie. _"Wait, no. You already took one truck out, so it's..."_

 _"Unlikely,"_ interjected Grim. _"Sam, Briggs, forget the procedure for now. Get a real count of how many centrifuges are in the convoy."_

"Roger that," said Sam. "Briggs, you go clockwise, I'll go counter-clockwise."

 _"Point zero eight percent,"_ said Charlie. _"So, highly unlikely."_

"Thanks, Charlie. Good to get some numbers on that."

 _"You're mocking me now, aren't you,"_ said Charlie suspiciously.

"You can't prove anything," said Sam. "We've already got license plates, but we'll photograph the interiors of each of the trucks. I suspect CIA will be interested in the results."

He met up with Briggs half an hour later on the exact opposite side of the circle.

"I've got about three hundred fifty," said his partner.

"Three hundred forty-eight, here," said Sam.

 _"So we're either looking at a few hundred carefully-made decoys, or..."_ Grim trailed off.

 _"Six hundred ninety-eight centrifuges,"_ finished Charlie, and this time no one had anything to say about his math.

* * *

Sam had to restrain himself from slamming his gear down the instant he set foot on Paladin's ramp. Instead he carefully inspected, stowed, and racked all his equipment and weaponry. Take care of your gear, Irving had always said, and it'll take care of you.

 _Then_ he stormed into the ops center and demanded, "Was CIA right about _anything!?"_

"Believe me, they've been informed," muttered Grim darkly. A few strands of red hair had come loose from her ponytail and flickered around her face as she snapped her attention back and forth.

"Options," said Sam.

"Best case, the original estimate is correct but they've just padded them out with decoys," answered Grim. "In that case we're not looking at a total catastrophe, but we would still have to search every single truck to find the real ones. Worst case, they're all real. Given the time it takes to disable each one we're looking at a combined total of fifty-eight hours straight just working on the machines."

"Please tell me that's not happening," said Briggs, arriving from stowing his own gear.

"What about taking the convoy out?"

"We have options for that, but none of them good. Sam, we can't just blow up a flagged military convoy in a foreign country."

"I understand the implications. But the consequences will be worse if we let those machines make it to their buyer," said Sam.

"There are less drastic solutions available," argued Grim.

"Such as?" asked Briggs.

"Such as having Charlie leak the convoy's existence to the Ukrainian police, or even the media. The fallout will be ugly but at least the centrifuges will be off the market."

"The Ukrainian government is so corrupt that I wouldn't be surprised if they were Kobin's old drinking buddies," said Briggs. "They'll probably just disappear again."

"I know it's not ideal, but I'm not sure there are any good answers here," said Grim. "At least with the bugs you two planted we'll have a continuous track on them. They won't reach Sevastopol till Monday at minimum. We have time to come up with something better."

"Alright," said Sam, though not without reluctance. "We hold off. For now. But Grim, I want combat drones with line-of-sight on that convoy at all times. We'll leave it as a last resort, but if I have to press that button, I will."

Grim sighed, but said, "Agreed."

Sam spent a few more minutes reviewing what else Charlie had fished out of the aether, all the while watching the pulsing sigil on the SMI that marked the convoy's location. When the last of the adrenaline and stimulants had vacated his bloodstream he bid Grim a good night and headed back to his own quarters to gather what sleep he could.

Charlie caught him on the way up, as he passed by the tech's loft workshop. "Hey, Sam, FYI, do you have any idea where Kobie is?" He must have seen something in Sam's expression because he hastened to add, "Wanted to get some local intel out of him, make it easier to do my traces."

"Are you done with mission prep?"

"Uh...no?"

"Then worry about that," growled Sam, and continued on his way.

* * *

Charlie woke to the subsonic vibration of one of his phones buzzing through the steel decking. He flailed around beneath his makeshift pillow before he found the offending device and silenced it. He rolled back, looking up at the underside of his largest workbench. His spine protested every motion. "Shit," he muttered to himself. He really had meant to get to a bed this time.

Ten minutes later monitor glow filled the workshop. He yawned as he tabbed through the myriad feeds, updates, sites, alerts, logs, and other miscellanea that had accumulated during his downtime. What day was it? He queried the calendar. Friday, it said, 1300h. He yawned again and considered, abstractly, the concept of jetlag. His body had long ago ceased to synchronize in any way with the local solar cycle. Paladin ran 24/7.

More feeds. More data. Update himself, then coffee. Then maybe a hot shower, to work out the kinks a steel floor could put in your back. They were on land right now, hooked up to a generator and a water line. He could take a real hot shower. Yeah. That sounded nice.

An hour later, when he wandered back to his station with damp hair and a fresh cup of coffee, a thought struck him. He put the mug down and brought up a couple of new windows.

Five minutes after that he was scrambling down the ladder and into ops where, somehow, impossibly, Grim was already holding court.

"Uh, Grim?" he called as he stumbled up the stairs and into the bright core. "We may have an additional complication."

Grim didn't look up from her screen. "Charlie, every time you say that it takes a year off my life," she complained.

"It's nothing with the convoy," Charlie hastened to add. "It's just that..." He twisted his fingers together. "Kobie is, uh...a little bit missing."

Grim's gestures halted. She set her tablet down on the top of the SMI, very carefully, and looked at Charlie. " 'Missing'," she repeated.

"Paladin's cameras got him leaving early Thursday morning and he hasn't come back yet."

"Any sign of why?"

"All I could see is that Sam was in the cargo bay too just before he left. Except, I asked Sam about it last night and he nearly bit my head off. I think maybe they had an argument?"

Grim sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Kobin grew up around here, Charlie. He's probably gone to sulk and eat familiar food and score some drugs." Of which Sam disapproves, she didn't need to add.

"No, see, if it were that we could just send Briggs to drag him back, yeah?" said Charlie. "But, uh, when I say 'missing,' I mean missing."

"As in..."

"As in his GPS tracker is offline, and so are the two backup tags on him, and facial recognition doesn't see him on any city surveillance cameras," said Charlie. "As in, as of three AM Friday morning, Andriy Kobin is in the wind."


	3. Put First Things First

Briggs leaned over Charlie's shoulder, staring at the map the tech had built up on the SMI. "And this is everything?"

"For the third time, _yes,"_ said Charlie, not looking away from the corner where he was manipulating the colors of the overlay. Patterns of signal swelled into bright pink, yellow, green, faded back to grey ghosts.

"Huge spike in traffic on the local channels," announced Grim from the console she had been working at silently for the last fifteen minutes. "I can't tell if it's government or organized crime, but either way something's ruffled their feathers."

"Could be Kobin, could be the convoy," mused Briggs.

"Could be both."

Grim sat up in her chair. "Welcome back, Sam," she said as Fourth Echelon's commander emerged into the op center's glow.

"Situation."

"Kobin's gone AWOL, no message, no indication of intent," said Grim.

"Location?"

"Off the grid," answered Charlie, still tracing glyphs on the SMI. "The main GPS tracker was disabled around midnight, but the two backup tags have him till 0304h. Then everything goes dark."

"Where'd he lose the GPS?"

"Unknown," admitted Charlie. "He got into a subway car and took it out somewhere along the way. It's all metal, Faraday cage. Nothing I can do about that."

"Backups?"

"Both cut off simultaneously. Must have been another Faraday cage."

"So you lost him."

"Probably not his first time doing this, boss," said Charlie shortly.

The temperature in the ops center dropped precipitously. Everyone paused for a moment to glance between Sam and Charlie.

Sam took a long, slow breath. "So what can you tell me?" in a voice of great restraint.

"Where he went in the meantime." Charlie finished his arcane scrawling and spread his hands over the SMI. "Heat map of his location till he went dark."

Sam leaned over the SMI. Wet pink plumes rolled through a pale blueprint of Donetsk. Four nexuses burnt to white where the trails had overlapped, where Kobin had waited for long periods of time.

Charlie cleared his throat. "It looks like, um, well, local intel is thin on the ground, but at least Donetsk has Google StreetView." Charlie tapped two fingers on each of the four bright spots. "That one's a bar, that one's another bar. That one's the middle of an alley, probably a meet. This one..." Charlie spread his fingers to call up the public imagery. A cracked brown sidewalk, dying grass, a small lake and white buildings on the horizon. "Pedestrian bridge. Don't know what that one's about. Another meet, I guess."

"Cigarette," said Sam.

"Or that," allowed Charlie.

Sam drew a finger along one of the paths. Wondered where he was going, what he was after. "And the last location?"

Charlie circled one location where the pink dimmed, lost some of its color. "That's where he lost the GPS. This..." He trailed his fingers out to where a wisp of pink dead-ended in a rectangle, one of many in a long line like bricks waiting to be stacked. "That's where he loses the backup tags."

"Alright." Sam straightened up and closed his eyes. Thought about disappearing. Thought about how to do it. How he'd done it.

"He would need a phone," he said without opening his eyes. "He would need money. And he would need ID."

"We never cooked Kobin a cover," said Grim. "He'd have to get brand-new docs."

"Burner phone," offered Charlie. "Could have bought one in that alley. In the bar, even."

Images flickered in the darkness behind Sam's eyes. Kobin on the helo. A black satchel by his side. Staring out the hangar, his brain working, already, on the problem of escape.

"He didn't do this on a whim," said Sam, opening his eyes. "He's been talking to someone. From Paladin. He must have a phone stashed somewhere."

"I never gave him one," said Charlie quickly.

"Doesn't matter. It's his job to find a way." Kobin heading upstairs with a carton of fruit under his arm. "Grim, Charlie, watch the chatter, see if you can figure out what he was doing at each of these stops. Briggs, with me." He started towards the crew ladder without bothering to check if the man was following.

Kobin's door had no lock; that, at least, everyone had agreed on. Sam pushed it open and threw the lightswitch. Kobin's crew bunk wasn't much more spacious than his holding cell. The furnishings were all riveted to the internal partitions to hold them down in flight. They had been painted the same battleship-grey as the rest of Paladin, like the walls had simply swollen up into appropriate shapes: the small bunk that folded up into a desk, the narrow locker, the low, corrugated-steel chest. Absolutely nothing Kobin owned matched that color.

"Sam?" asked Briggs from the doorway.

Sam pulled the thin mattress off the bunk. "We're going to find that phone."

Half an hour later Sam found himself sitting on the floor against the chest. Briggs leaned against the one open patch of wall, which sported a huge and lurid poster for...something, which seemed to involve lasers, headlined in giant Cyrillic capitals. The floor between them contained three bottles of cheap vodka, a couple grams of high-grade cocaine, a wide variety of prescription pills that should have been in the infirmary, about twenty thousand US dollars distributed amongst various currencies, three homemade shivs, and zero phones.

"Good lord," said Briggs as he leafed through the little black book they'd found with the coke. "I don't know what cipher Kobin's using, but I'm fairly certain this means Paladin buys an incredible amount of porn."

"Leave that thing alone."

"Come on, Sam, every unit's got its little underground economy."

"Yeah, and every unit's commander pretends he doesn't know about it."

Briggs sighed, but closed the book and laid it on the desk. "I do have to say, things have gotten a lot more professional since Kobin took over...uh...unofficial requisitions."

"That continues to be information I do not need to have," griped Sam. "What I _do_ need to know is, how the hell did that guy manage to hide something from two professional intelligence agents?"

"Because you're thinking like Sam Fisher right now," said Grim. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, apparently amused at their thorough dismantling of the room. "Not like Andriy Kobin, professional sneaky dirtbag."

Sam was too annoyed to do more than raise an eyebrow at her. "Enlighten us, then," said Briggs, sarcasm heavy in his voice.

"Where do you hide a red fish?" said Grim.

Sam blinked, puzzled.

"One time Third Echelon had to move a shipment of highly sensitive intercept antennas," said Grim. "We were all ready to land it on a dark shore in the middle of the night. Kobin took them apart and stashed them in a container full of camera tripods. Nobody batted an eye."

"Hiding in plain sight," said Briggs slowly.

"Where do you hide a red fish?" asked Grim again, and then answered, "In a pond full of other red fish."

Charlie was in his loft socketed into the concave shelter of his full battlestation, all six monitors twitching with feeds and maps. "Where's the secure comms gear?" asked Sam, then tapped Charlie on the shoulder and asked again. Charlie flinched in surprise, disengaging from the screens. "Uh...over there," he said, blinking rapidly. He pointed to the tall battleship-grey cabinet set against one wall. Long rails above it held it bolted to the fuselage. "Do you need something?"

"Kobin ever ask to borrow a phone?"

"What? No! Not that I would give him one anyway."

"Where are they?"

"Middle shelf, second from the top." Sam unlatched the double doors. The shelf second from the top had some long serrated black device lying across it like the ridge of plates on a dragon's spine. Grey rectangles slotted between each sawtooth peak. Soft blue lights glowed at their bases.

"He didn't steal a phone!" protested Charlie from just behind him. "I keep them under _strict surveillance."_ He stabbed a finger at the tablet in his hand. "I'm telling you, there are twelve secure phones, and I've got them all reading as logged in right here."

"Twelve," said Sam.

"Yes!"

"Not thirteen."

"What?"

Sam pointed to the shelf. Charlie counted.

"Son of a bitch," he muttered.

Sam pulled out the last phone tucked between the dragon's spines, nearly lost behind the hinges of the door. A piece of masking tape across the back read "BROKEN - DO NOT USE."

"Red fish," said Grim.

"Can you crack this?" said Sam, handing the phone to Charlie.

"Please. As if _Kobie_ could find an encryption setup I can't break." Charlie experimentally tapped a few buttons, then pressed two simultaneously. The screen lit up. His face fell. "I, um, I am gonna need someone who speaks Ukrainian, though," he admitted.

"You can have Grim." She shot him a cold glare. "If she's up for it," he amended quickly.

"Let me know when you've stripped the first layer and I'll come up," she told Charlie.

"Good," said Sam. "In the meantime, there isn't much else we can do. Briggs, you're free. Charlie, Grim, let me know when we have anything more."

He turned and headed back towards the crew quarters. One perk of being commander: no one asked you what you were doing when you went off somewhere. No one turned in the hallway to follow him as he paced back to his own small cabin. He shut the door and sat on the bed. It had hardly been an hour since Grim's call woke him. The sheets were still crumpled up.

Kobin was gone.

The thought didn't really make sense. In his mind he registered it in the ever-shifting web of his awareness, bobbling alongside threats, resources, priorities, concerns. But underneath-- something strange stirred in his gut. A fizzing tension cramped his arms, powered his motions like clockwork unspooling. Anger, real anger, but at what? He wanted to kill someone. He wanted to yell. He wanted to go get his asset back. He wanted to forget about the whole thing. He didn't know the name of what he wanted. The shape of this had struck some previously unmapped pressure point of the psyche.

Sam shifted his weight and stood; the tension wouldn't let him sit. He lifted the crumpled sheet and began to make his bed with mechanical precision. Kobin's stupid purple shirt had been in his cabin, along with most of his carton of fruit; along with the weird feathered thing he'd bought in Buenos Aires that he denied all knowledge of when sober, the twelve bottles of extra-sweet Mexican Coca-Cola in a sway-proof rack, the boxes of strange foreign candy bars labeled in four separate languages that Sam and Briggs had sorted through piece by piece. All of it had been left behind.

_You don't know jack shit about me._

Kobin had lived on Paladin for four months now, been interrogated a dozen times, and yet the resulting structure of dates and clients and jobs and shipments lay hollow as a cast-off shell. The person it had formed around had absented himself, shed it, moved on. And taken with him the last unquarried vein: Third Echelon. He'd talked about his work for Reed, but nothing before that. Sam smoothed down the last fold of his blanket, dropped his pillow on top, and began to walk a narrow circle. How long had Kobin taken contracts from Irving Lambert? How long had he silently handled Third Echelon's dirty work?

How much of that dirty work had there really been?

Sam reached the clothes locker at the other end of his room, turned, walked back the other way. He knew plenty about Andriy Kobin. He knew that he was an arms dealer, a smuggler, a timid weasel with absolutely no loyalties, a general provider of services who could get you anything you wanted if the price was right. Sam paced past the bed, into the corner by the desk, turn, back to the bed. He knew that Andriy Kobin had illegible handwriting in three alphabets, listened to techno whenever he was really trying to concentrate ("it's _hard house,_ Fisher, you uncultured barbarian"), and mimicked accents with uncanny accuracy. He knew that Andriy Kobin found pictures of cats making stupid faces on the internet to be way more entertaining than a sane adult should. Another circle round the cabin. He knew that underneath the drug-fueled mania and the petty irresponsibility and the hardass image Kobin tried too hard to project lived a very smart, very dangerous man.

He knew, deep in some walled-off corner of his mind, that once he had figured out that man existed he hadn't been able to stop thinking about him.

Kobin had never talked about Third Echelon because Sam had never wanted to know. Making that level of decisions wasn't his place. Except that it was, now, and it shouldn't be. He wasn't meant to be in the commander's cabin. He was meant to be the man on the ground, the tip of the spear, and in that singleminded focus he had found an utter surety of motion. And Irving was right there with him, all the way, whispering orders in his ear; _go left, get that laptop, bring him back alive._

Irving had betrayed him. With all the love in the world, all the finest intentions, and nothing but Sam's - and Sarah's - best interests at heart, he had staged Sarah's death and then he had lied to Sam about it for three years. The nerves along his arms twitched. Fingers contracted, searching for triggers. The electric hum of combat boiled in his blood with nowhere to go. He needed a mission. When the mission started this complicated world laid itself out and became clear. His muscles craved that adrenaline surge. The pure and irreversible solutions inherent in violence.

_Don't lie to me, Fisher. Cause I already know what you are._

Tom Reed had been the source of the original threat. But Tom Reed was dead, and so was Irving, and that left two targets for that poisonous stew of grief and guilt and impotent rage: Grim, who had kept Sarah safe and given her back to him, and Kobin, who dumped a body on the side of the road and told everyone he'd killed her. And it was so easy to hate Kobin. He _made_ it easy. He was loud and crass and antagonizing; he provoked Sam every chance he had and acted blissfully unrepentant for anything he'd done. He lounged in ops in his gaudy outfits as this constant reminder of the underside of humanity, one of Them sitting here with Us.

Because the other option was squaring his memories of his closest friend with the man who took Sarah away from him.

Sam paced, and thought, and got nowhere.

* * *

"Leonid Kostiuk," said Grim, as the relevant photo materialized. A well-coiffed blond stared down from the main screen with a stern paternal gaze. "CEO, industrialist, financial minister in the current Ukrainian government, head of the crime syndicate that governs most of eastern Ukraine."

"Now there's a delightful combination," remarked Briggs.

"Kostiuk's the center of the recent upswing in chatter, near as we can tell," said Grim.

"Who is this guy?" asked Sam.

"Former KGB, quit when the Soviet Union disintegrated, bought up state-owned businesses in the chaos after the fall. Classic kleptocrat. He's been financial minister for the last seven years, which mostly means diverting as many government contracts as possible to his own companies. Intelligence indicates he took full control of local organized crime about four years back."

"Ties to Kobin?"

"Other than running in the same circles, not really," said Grim. "Not any more than Kobin had to the rest of the Ukrainian mob. Like I said, Kostiuk owns most of eastern Ukraine, so Kobin always cut him in when he dealt in that area. They did business several times over the past decade, always seemed amicable, no conflicting interests. Kostiuk's just..." Grim searched for words. "A coworker."

"Kobin's name hasn't been mentioned, but Kostiuk's goons have made several references that are probably him," said Charlie from his ops console, half into his mug of coffee. "Most of them are, uh, a bit profane."

"Sounds about right," said Sam. "So odds are he's run to Kostiuk."

"To be fair, we don't even know he ran," pointed out Charlie.

"It is probably simpler to list the people who _don't_ want Kobin's head on a spike," conceded Grim.

"That's a question for when we find him. Charlie. The phone?"

"I'm almost done downloading the contents, but in the meantime I pulled the nearby cell tower records. A signal matching it logged several calls from around Paladin the night before Kobie went missing."

"Making or receiving?"

"He receives one around 0400h local, then he calls two others. Then people call him back. There's a lot of back-and-forth, then around 0630h this phone goes dark."

"IDs on the calls?"

"Traced, piece of cake, but all burners. Professionals."

"So that gives us nothing."

"Yeah." Charlie's mouth twisted down into a grimace. "As long as he had a secret phone, I kinda wish he'd taken it with him. The algs will keep looking, though." He took a last gulp of coffee and stood. "In the meantime, I'll go prep the tri-rotors."

"Excuse me?"

Charlie pointed to the equipment lockers. "I'm gonna go get the drones ready," he said more slowly. "To find Kobie," he added, when everyone continued to stare at him.

"We're not risking the mission for one asset," said Grim.

"Wait." Charlie looked around the room. "What?"

"Kobin can take care of himself for a few days," said Grim. "Dealing with the centrifuges and finishing the mission is our priority."

"But... Isn't the mission blown if Kobin talks?" said Charlie. "Aren't we all totally boned? 'Cause he knows, like, everything. About us, about the plane, the missions. He's got intel on..." He waved his hand in a wide circle.

A cold, stomach-dropping pause. Grim pressed a hand to her brow. Sam tipped back his head and closed his eyes.

"All of Fourth Echelon," he said.

"Shit," muttered Briggs.

"When the fuck did he get..." Sam trailed off, unsure what he meant to say. It didn't matter. It was decision time, he could feel it: the microscopic charge in the atmosphere as everyone shifted towards him like iron filings aligning in the field of responsibility. The true decisions hit him hard, every time. But some times there was no choice to be made, even though everyone acted like there was; it was impossible, to Sam, for events to proceed any other way.

That fizzing tension boiled up through his limbs again, and he knew that it was one of those.

He opened his eyes again. "Charlie, send his last known location to my OPSAT," he ordered. "We can't hit the convoy again till tonight, and we don't have a plan yet anyway. Briggs, we're going on a field trip."

"Objectives?"

"Retrace his steps, find him, make sure he stays quiet. One way or another."

* * *

The warehouse Charlie had flagged as Kobin's last transmitted location slunk in its slot between two identical buildings, a crumbling brick picket fence marking the outskirts of the city. At some point the wide interior had been some sort of factory and long rows of desks and drafting tables still sat bolted to the concrete. Their loose metal had been scavenged long ago and only the skeletons remained, picked clean and alternating gleaming steel and rust. Dust coated everything and the only light came from windows that hadn't seen soap in decades. Half were smashed and a hot breeze whistled in the gaps. There was a bullet hole in one.

"Tracks," said Briggs, kneeling in the dust. "Heading to the middle."

At the center of the room a square clearing in the furniture graveyard captured the trash blowing through the building. Broken wood, beer bottles, syringes, newspaper, drifted against the feet of the bolted-down desks like sand piling into dunes. On one side the trash had been scattered across the floor, kicked up into shapes the wind hadn't yet had time to erase.

Briggs had crawled beneath one of the rusted steel shells. Now he emerged holding up an old-style flip phone, its body colored beetle-green. The screen had cracked into white spiderwebs. "Charlie, does this look familiar?" he asked, holding it up to the OPSAT's camera lens.

 _"It's not one of ours,"_ radioed back Charlie. _"But that model's super common for burners."_

Briggs pressed the power button a few times without success. He flipped it over and lifted the beetle's carapace. "Battery's been removed. And the SIM card."

 _"Trashed,"_ said Charlie.

"Put it in a bag," said Sam. "We've got Kobin's fingerprints on file."

"Roger that," said Briggs, finding a ziploc in one of his pockets.

Sam stood at the center of the clearing and turned in a slow circle. He let his gaze trail over the junk dunes, the ranks of ancient furniture. Fast-food wrappers had been shoved aside in a peculiarly straight line. Sam followed it under another desk. Nothing, and then he reached under the steel drawers that nearly touched the ground, and found something yielding.

He dragged it out into the light: a black satchel smeared with grey dust. "Grim, I've got Kobin's bag," he reported. He lifted it by the strap. It felt slick, heavy, some kind of ballistic nylon.

 _"Sure it's his?"_ asked Grim.

"Saw him with it the morning of," said Sam. He set the bag on the desk's surface and laid out the contents one by one. Bottle of water, label in Arabic. Two more beetle phones, plus a little plastic baggie of SIM cards. Several folders of paper typed in Cyrillic; more than one bore a KGB seal and the legend Совершенно секретно.

_"Bugout bag?"_

"Or something like." A sealed ziploc bag containing neat rectangular blocks of US currency. Candy bar, Japanese. Passport with a Swiss seal. In a side pocket, thick with padding, three persimmons wrapped carefully in a paper napkin from Paladin's mess. Sam laid the blocks of money out in a grid, counting. Almost a hundred thousand. "This looks like nearly all of Paladin's petty cash."

He heard Grim talking to someone else on the other end. _"We haven't been keeping it locked up,"_ she admitted. _"There wasn't much reason to."_

"Except if this is Kobin's bugout bag, why is it here?" said Briggs.

Sam looked again around the clearing, around the expanse of the warehouse, with its unsettled trash and the bullet hole in one glass windowpane. He eyed the bag's contents laid out across the desk. "Briggs. What's missing?"

Briggs gave him a mildly annoyed look, but stepped to the edge of the desk and ran his gaze over the items. "No weapon," he said suddenly.

"Exactly," said Sam.

 _"No way he'd have gone out unarmed,"_ agreed Grim.

"Not a gun," mused Sam. "A gun makes things messy." _"Guns escalate shit, Fisher,"_ said a voice in his memory, as careful hands assembled a makeshift stunner from a disposable camera's flashbulb. _"No point in being rude before you have to."_

The breeze stirred the drifts of refuse, fluttering faded colors against the concrete. Sam went back to the place where the bag had been shoved along the floor, knelt, pushed aside newspapers sun-bleached to blankness. Metal clinked against stone. Underneath a layer of disintegrating coupons he scooped up a pair of bright copper arrowheads. He stood and showed them to Briggs, who swore.

"Grim, I've got taser electrodes," said Sam. "Fired." He kicked apart a few more trash dunes. The little black rectangle had sunk to the bottom of one of them, a gaping slot on one side where the cartridge had been ejected and not replaced. He picked it up with a ziploc bag to preserve any fingerprints, but the taser might as well have a name written on the side. Next to it a single golden persimmon had been trampled into the concrete.

Sam tapped two fingers on the skin behind his left ear. "Grim, I don't think Kobin ran," he radioed. "I think he was taken."

* * *

"I have Kostiuk's main centers of operation mapped out," said Grim when he returned to the ops center. "But I doubt it'll do us much good. A high-value target like Kobin won't be somewhere a lot of people have access to."

"Charlie?" called Sam. "Tell me you can narrow down the places we have to check."

Charlie remained upstairs ensconced in his battlestation, his voice piped through the SMI's speakers. _"Working to intercept Kostiuk's comms specifically. But in the meantime, here's something interesting."_ The main screen in ops blanked and switched to an empty video window.

"I was using that, Charlie," complained Grim. "You know I hate it when you do that."

_"Sorry, back in a moment. Anyway, with both a time and a place, I tried to scrape up some pictures. Nothing on the local cams, but an ONYX bird was in the right place at the right time to get these guys."_

The video window expanded, cleared into a greyscale nighttime image of the warehouse. A truck, white with reflective metal, drove up to the building's dark rectangle. Pale grey globs detached from it, spread out along the perimeter, disappeared within. As they moved the bright shapes of weapons blinked in and out.

"Armed," said Sam.

 _"And deliberately avoiding local CCTV. An hour later Kobin's tracker shuts off."_  

"Was he dragged to the warehouse?" asked Briggs. "Maybe it was just a staging location."

 _"Sorry. I don't have Kobie's arrival on video."_  

"That warehouse is a good spot for a meet. Let's assume it was there, for now," said Sam. "Good work."

"Charlie," said Grim sharply.

 _"Okay, okay."_ The main screen flickered again and returned to the abstract netting Grim had been using to assist whatever process of deduction her mind followed. The framework collapsed, stowed down into a sigil in the corner of the SMI. Bright globes floated up to replace it like escaping balloons.

"So. Kobin goes out on the town," said Grim. Labels began to appear on the globes. "Drinks a lot. Buys burner phones. Goes to a meet. Leaves with a bag over his head. Somewhere along the way he gets ahold of several classified Soviet files. "

Sam straightened up. "You get anything from those?"

"They're mostly KGB archive documents," reported Grim without looking up. "A lot of information on the Russian mob, Russian black market, mixed with some Ukrainian stuff. Everything's late nineties or earlier. It's Kobin's ballpark, but it's not obvious how they're related."

"If Kobin was carrying that much cash I'm guessing it wasn't just walking-around money. He was buying something," said Sam.

"Weapons, ID documents. Passage out. For all we know he could have been arranging a hit. Paying someone off. Making another arms buy."

"Paying someone off." Sam snapped his fingers. "That's what the files are. Proof."

"Blackmail?" said Briggs. "Kobin's been interrogated a dozen times. What does he still have left to be dangerous?"

 _"Maybe someone found out he's working with us,"_ said Charlie.

"The blackmail could be a setup. With Fourth Echelon as the real target," said Grim. "And if it's coming from Kostiuk, it could be a Ukrainian-backed operation." She turned a level grey gaze on Sam. "In a few hours we might not be able to leave the country."

"Then we'd better move fast," said Sam. "Grim, infil options on all the possible holding sites. Briggs and I will handle the extraction." He braced his hands on the SMI's glass surface. Networks pulsed beneath his fingertips. "Let's go get our asset back."


	4. Think Win-Win

_"Kostiuk left a Ukrainian cabinet meeting rather abruptly this morning,"_ explained Charlie. _"No luck with his phone, but satellites got his car moving through the city. He headed to a dacha he owns out in the countryside. That's where you're going right now. Lot of cars parked around it."_  

"Thermal imaging?"

 _"Not as good as I'd like. Cell traffic suggests at least 20 people there, though."_  

"Armed?"

 _"Non-lethal only, Sam,"_ cut in Grim. _"We're operating in this country illegally; please don't give one of its cabinet members reason to want us out."_

"I got it, Grim. I got it the first three times you reminded me." He looked over at the van's driver. "Not a lot of options for overwatch."

"Don't even know why I bothered bringing my kit," grumbled Briggs. Slow, rolling hills scrolled past the window, interrupted by brief flickers of tree. "Dacha's too small for both of us running around. I'll take the perimeter. You go get Kobin."

Sam groaned in mock disgust. "You're sticking me with him? I thought we were friends."

"Yeah, so far you're the only person who can get him to shut up," answered Briggs.

"What a terrible superpower."

"I dunno, man, I'm pretty impressed."

 _"The satellite imagery is uploading to your OPSATs now,"_ resumed Charlie. _"But I'll spoil the surprise: the dacha's in the middle of open country. Grassland. The building itself is in its own little clump of trees, but the approaches are universally crap."_

Sam leaned over to look in the rear-view mirror. The sun burnt a bright streak low on the western horizon. "We'll go at twilight. Best chance to make it in under cover. Charlie, give me tall grass, drainage ditches, anything you can." 

_"Uploading topography now."_

"Any intel on Kobin's location?"

_"Like I said, there's twenty to thirty signals in there. Thermal imaging can't resolve them too well. I assume they'll do the actual, uh, questioning in the basement, since his pal probably didn't kidnap him to drink tea and chat about the good old days."_

_"Not necessarily,"_ countered Grim. _"If they're trying to hide him they'll put him downstairs. But Kostiuk's a known quantity. He won't need to rough Kobin up to prove he's serious."_

They turned the panel van Charlie had bought off the Ukrainian equivalent of Craigslist onto a wooded turn-off a good half-hour's travel from the dacha just as the bottom of the sun touched the treeline. A windstorm had left plenty of downed branches in the area and it took only a couple of minutes to drape the camo netting over the van's dull grey flanks. A few meters further east and the trees gave way to open fields. "Ugh," muttered Briggs a few feet away, flattening the grass with one hand. Sam couldn't disagree. Barely six inches high. Too short to help them hide, plenty long enough to conceal tripwires, mines, hell, just regular old gopher holes. He gauged again the angle of the sun, then turned his gaze towards the distant point where his OPSAT claimed the dacha lay.

"Hope you don't get hay fever," said Sam reluctantly. He dropped down full-length into the grass. It rasped across his goggles. "We're going to have to take this one slow."

"Should have brought my rifle," grumbled Briggs, but dropped, too, to hug the ground, and they began the crawl.

 _"In the meantime, Charlie and I think we have a lead on what Kostiuk's planning to do with him,"_ said Grim.

"Oh, good," said Briggs. "An audiobook."

 _"In brief, Kostiuk's planning to sell Kobin to the Morlov crime syndicate in Russia for a really amazing amount of money,"_ said Charlie.

"Why?"

 _"At first I thought it was just the CIA thing, when we burned him during Blacklist. But - no offense to Kobie - forty million is_ way _more than he's worth. So I did some digging and turned up something else weird: it's not just the Morlov syndicate. The Morlov_ family _is directly involved in the deal. All Kostiuk's communications went straight to them, and that's way more juice than Kostiuk rates. This is personal."_

"Kobin must have history with the Morlovs," said Briggs.

"What a surprise," deadpanned Sam. "Any leads on what?"

 _"We're talking old Soviet records here, prehistoric."_ Charlie sounded personally offended by the idea. _"That whole time period's a black hole. Digital versions just don't exist."_

"So it's not about Fourth Echelon."

 _"We can't rule it out, but no. We don't seem to be the primary target,"_ said Grim. _"Based on what's in those files he was carrying, our best guess is that it's connected to the death of Grigor Morlov."_ A photo appeared on the OPSAT's display of a man with a round, egg-like face only exacerbated by his bald scalp, glaring into the camera. _"Grigor Morlov was old_ vor _, a thief-in-law. Cut his teeth in Stalin's gulags. He became head of the syndicate in 1973, built it into a major concern. Took it through the collapse of the USSR. Then in 1995 someone assassinated him and ran off with the syndicate's entire liquid cash reserve."_

" 'Someone'?" echoed Briggs. "They didn't know who?"

_"The family was howling for blood, but no. They never found him."_

"So if the Morlov family thinks Kobin has answers…"

"One washed-up arms dealer isn't worth much," said Sam. "But settling a decades-old family vendetta would be well worth the price Kostiuk's asking."

"Kobin was in the same line of work, he might have known the guy. Maybe even helped him," guessed Briggs.

"But why now?" countered Sam. "If Kobin did have any information I'd be shocked he hadn't sold it years ago."

 _"We're still working on that,"_ said Grim, which meant _No idea. "For all we know Kostiuk found out about the vendetta and sold the Morlovs a bill of goods."_

_"And set Kobie up to take the fall," added Charlie._

The twilight world floated in a haze of blue, deep above and dark below, all submerged in the dusk. The slate-blue dacha dissolved into a skeleton of white trim. Lights glowed from the windows and cast golden stripes across the grass. Its deep windowsills and filigree fretwork made climbing one side of it no harder than walking up a steep hillside. Sam hung below an arched window that looked down a narrow hallway paneled in some honey-varnished hardwood. The guard who had been stationed here was most obviously and most utterly bored out of his mind. Sam planned to liven up his night. A minute later he was creeping along that honey-colored floor, feeling out each uneven plank and hoping it wouldn't creak beneath his weight.

Kobin might not be here. He might be in a basement, or further - who knew how far underground the dacha went? But Grim was right. He doubted Kostiuk meant to injure Kobin, at least at first. So he tapped his radio and murmured, "Beginning my sweep in the attic."

 _"Roger that,"_ answered Briggs, his voice a synthesized monotone through the subvocal mic.

Sam passed two small bedrooms leading off the hallway, each with a low sloping roof. Both were empty and dark even to night-vision. The beds in them were child-sized, bare mattresses. That seemed like a more comfortable spot for the sleeping goon now slumped beneath the window, so Sam retrieved his unconscious form and laid him out before continuing. At the end of the hallway a stair covered in a tongue of chartreuse carpet led down to his left. On the far side of it the hallway ended at a door that leaned ajar. Warm light spilled from the gap. Another guard leaned against the stair railing, smoking a cigarette. Two voices drifted from the parlor, speaking in rapid-fire Ukrainian. It took Sam a moment to place the louder one as Kobin.

"Не очікувайте, що я по-вірю тому, що ви не замішані у вантаженні."

"Це все був Антоша, клянусь. П'яний покидьок вже нічого не пам'ятав на наступний день."

This guard was not adverse to catching some downtime either. Sam slid him along the glassy hardwood. He could join his comrade in the other bedroom. When he returned to the door the tone of the conversation had taken a marked swing for the worse. He leaned against the door frame and listened hard, concentrating on funneling the Ukrainian through his own knowledge of Russian.

"Look, Leonid, not that I don't enjoy a day out in the old country," Kobin was saying, "but somehow I do not think you _invited_ me out here for a cup of tea."

"Always business with you, Дюша." Kostiuk hit the nickname oddly, as if making a point. Silverware rattled. "I would savor that cup of tea, if I were you. You are going to Russia tomorrow."

"I would prefer not. Too humid this time of year."

Sam slipped down his goggles and toggled his OPSAT. The world went grey and an infrasonic ping splashed outwards in a white ripple. Two men sitting across from each other, one facing towards the door, one away. Fifty-fifty chance, then. He returned the goggles to optical and slipped his snake cam under the door. Lucky day. The tall man who sat with his back to the door could only be Kostiuk. The room itself had the look of an old parlor, carpeted in more chartreuse with floral wallpaper to match. Faded pictures dotted the walls and the table was a small round affair covered with a white lace cloth. And on the other side of it...

Christ. Andriy looked _awful_.

Sam pressed one hand ever so slowly against the base of the door till he could peer in through the crack. Kostiuk took a sip from a white mug before answering. It was thick and chipped. "The timing is terrible, I admit, but this is how matters have fallen out. The Morlovs will not be kept waiting."

"I keep telling you, I don't _know anything!"_ protested Kobin, dropping any pretense of calm. Dark circles ringed his eyes so that Sam couldn't tell whether he was injured or just sleep-deprived. "This is absurd! You know what they'll do to me!"

"And if I had not read the files myself, I would surely believe you now. But you know my former occupation. There is no point in continuing the charade."

Sam holstered his pistol, unfolded the spring-gun, and chambered one electrode-laden shell. _Big trouble if Kostiuk gets dead,_ he reminded himself reluctantly. He aligned the sights over the base of Kostiuk's neck. _But that doesn't mean he can't take a little nap._

"Jesus, Leonid," muttered Kobin, shaking his head. When he bent forward Sam saw the pad of white gauze surgical-taped to his neck. Kobin picked up his own mug and dropped in a chunk of sugar from a little dish. An old white teapot and another dish filled with something violently red completed the set. Kobin spooned up some of that as well and the scent of sour cherry suffused the air. "You really are in bed with those Russian scumbags. Things have gone seriously downhill since I left."

"The Russians are trash," said Kostiuk contemptuously. "But money knows no nationality."

"Wait, that's it?" said Kobin, looking up from the dish of cherries. "You're just going to...sell me? I have to admit, I'm a little bit insulted."

"You should be flattered. Your fate will fetch me no less than forty million US dollars."

Kobin popped the spoonful of cherry into his mouth and took a long drink of tea. His face was calm, his body relaxed. But from his vantage point Sam could see the fingers of one hand give a quick, unconscious tap at a spot on his chest just below the sternum; the strange tell that Kobin could never suppress and Sam had never been able to figure out.

Kobin swallowed his tea and said, "That's it?" He laughed. "I could beat that, easy."

Sam pressed the door open another few inches. He leaned into the room just a fraction, just enough to let the light fall across his face. _You're taking pointless risks,_ that voice that sounded like Grim scolded him. He ignored it. Anyway, the last thing he needed was Kobin yelling when Kostiuk went down.

"Dyusha," chided Kostiuk as Kobin went for the teapot. "Everyone believes that you turned traitor to CIA. Really, you are in luck that I found you. I suspect most of my compatriots would simply shoot you on sight."

Kobin finished refilling his tea, lifted his mug, looked up. Met Sam's eyes.

The tea paused for a moment in midair. Expressions flashed past almost too fast to read, Kobin clamping down at once on anything that might betray him. Relief. Joy.

And then Sam saw _it._ A predatory flicker in hazel eyes. A smile that bared a hint of teeth. The look of a hunter sighting prey.

The look of a man about to do something incredibly, wantonly stupid.

The tea completed its journey to his mouth.

"Of course I'm working for the CIA," said Kobin. He set down the mug and stirred the dish of cherries again.

Sam's eyes widened. Kostiuk seemed no less surprised.

"You…do not deny it, then?" he said.

"Are you kidding?" Kobin repeated the exercise with the cherries, dropping them into his mouth before taking a great swallow of tea. "This is my dream job."

 _"What the fuck is he doing?"_ hissed Grim in his ear.

"Telling сукины tales for the Americans," scoffed Kostiuk.

"Running _guns_ for the Americans," corrected Kobin, waving a finger. He set down his mug. "Look. They act like they are so much better than us, but in the end their laundry is just as dirty. The difference is, they have to worry about exposure. Ever hear their 'Iran-Contra'? They need cover, they need deniability, and they're willing to pay for it. That is what I provide."

"You buy and sell the weapons…" said Kostiuk slowly.

"Set up meetings, get things across the border. Supply whatever else they need but cannot officially buy. I get a cut and CIA protection." Kobin managed a half-smile. "I'm telling you, it does not get much better."

"And this CIA business simply happened to bring you to the area."

Kobin threw an arm over the back of the chair. "I don't know if you heard, but someone just auctioned off designs and prototypes of Russian nuclear centrifuges for no less than fifty-seven million dollars."

"I had heard something like that," muttered Kostiuk. His voice had gone as sour as the cherries.

 _"He was a bidder,"_ said Charlie suddenly in his ear. _"Kobie tracked that one down."_

"Well, the Americans have an interest in keeping things like that out of their enemies' hands, but they couldn't stop the sale in time. So instead they bought it themselves," said Kobin casually. "To be honest, despite the payout, I find myself bothered by the whole affair. A bunch of idiot русские hicks making that much cash? They hardly deserve it."

Kostiuk didn't reply to that, but Sam saw his shoulders straighten. The man leaned forward a fraction. "Naturally the CIA could never admit to such a transaction," he said.

"Course not. But if a known arms dealer buys them up, then turns around and sells, well, that wouldn't surprise anyone. Except then CIA just happens to raid the right cargo ship. They seize the centrifuges, everyone gets a medal, the world is saved." Kobin made a mock toast with his tea mug. "And I take a hefty commission."

"I'm so happy your business is doing well."

"It could be your business too, Leonid," said Kobin in that inviting salesman's voice. "If you have the connections to move them, you could easily get seventy-five for those machines. I've arranged the convoy that's moving them down to Севасто́поль. If they just happened to run into trouble along the way, well, that is hardly my fault, is it?"

"You're suggesting I seize the convoy."

"Not like anyone is going to file a police report. And then you can name your price. Or keep them yourself."

Kostiuk stiffened. "What would I do with nuclear centrifuges?"

Kobin sat forward again, suddenly serious. "You know exactly what, Leonid. Fifteen years ago Ukraine gave up its missiles for a lie and everyone knows it. The Budapest Memorandum isn't worth the paper it's printed on. The Russians _will_ come, and Donetsk is gonna be on the front lines." He lowered his voice. "One bomb, Leonid. Twelve pounds of uranium, that's all it'll take. One bomb and the Red Army never sets foot on our soil. And you're the one who controls it."

 _"He's selling Kostiuk a nuclear war,"_ said Grim, appalled.

"And Kostiuk's buying," Sam murmured back.

Kostiuk said nothing for a long minute. Kobin didn't press him, only sipped at his tea and leaned back at apparent ease.

"How would such an ambush be carried out?" said Kostiuk at last.

"Well," said Kobin, putting down his mug and drawing shapes on the table. "The machines are moving in a CIA convoy, traveling undercover as a Red Army group. It looks pretty good, I don't mind saying, but it's all just window dressing."

Kostiuk raised an eyebrow. "The CIA is moving goods through a foreign country in person?"

Kobin shrugged. "Stupid bureaucrats want eyes on the damn machines the whole time." He grinned. "It's like they don't trust me."

"When and where," said Kostiuk flatly.

"I'm not that cheap of a date, Leonid."

"Fine," conceded Kostiuk. "I will make excuses to the Morlovs. If the convoy is where you say - and if we can take it - then you have your freedom."

"As always, a pleasure doing business with you," said Kobin with a wide smile. His eyes found Sam again and the flash of naked terror in them almost made Sam pull the trigger. "I know I can count on you."

* * *

"That was a long way for a lot of nothing," said Briggs as he slammed the equipment locker shut harder than was strictly necessary. "We could have pulled Kobin out in five minutes and gotten back in ten. Instead we spend all day finding him and then we leave his ass there?"

"The boss is nuts," agreed Charlie, swiveling in his work chair. "Uh, but I never said that."

"Not that I don't trust Sam," Briggs hastened to add. "But it would it kill the guy to share with the rest of us once in a while?"

"Communication isn't exactly Sam's strong suit."

"Both of you, ops, now," growled Grim as she swept in from the forward flight deck.

"Wow, okay, what's on fire," said Charlie as he ran to match her pace.

"What's on _fire_ is that our commander is trying to gamble on a half-assed plan to frame a Ukrainian politician for international terrorism," she snapped. "Any time you want to help me out with that would be great."

Sam was somehow already out of his gear and pacing in ops when they arrived. "Options," he ordered as soon as Grim set foot on the platform.

"Very few," she answered in the same brusque tone. "Sam, I hate to be this person, but we can't kill the Ukrainian financial minister. For one thing, he's not currently a threat to national security. For another, he's _the Ukrainian financial minister."_

"That doesn't make him above the law," retorted Sam.

"But it does make him impossible to deal with quietly," snapped Grim. "Don't play naive with me, Sam, you know the score as well as I do. Without a miracle, Kostiuk's off-limits."

"He's deeply involved in organized crime."

"And so is the rest of the Ukrainian government," answered Grim, exasperated.

"He could become a national security threat. Kostiuk's dangerous. He's not going to be content with eastern Ukraine, and it sounds like he has nuclear ambitions of his own. If we don't do something now, we're going to end up needing to do a lot more later."

"That's a good point, Sam. And it doesn't change our situation."

"That's Kobin's play," said Sam suddenly, wheeling to a stop. "We change the situation."

"Really? Because so far all I've seen him do is bluff with no cards to keep his ass from being deported."

"Kostiuk will chase that convoy," asserted Sam. "The bait's too tempting."

"And what happens when Kostiuk calls Kobin's bluff?"

"We make it not a bluff. We use Kobin to feed Kostiuk the convoy's itinerary and convince him it's CIA. Kostiuk attacks the convoy looking for the centrifuges and we catch him in the act. We get the centrifuges, Kostiuk, and Kobin all in one sweep."

"And if he manages to seize the convoy and get away with it, we lose the centrifuges and there's no telling where they end up," countered Grim. "Sam, we're talking about a plan that hinges entirely on Andriy Kobin being able to keep it together. _Andriy Kobin."_

"I agree with Grim, for what it's worth," chimed in Charlie. Neither of them so much as glanced his way.

"Stay out of this one, man," Briggs murmured to him.

"Kobin's no hero," said Sam. "He wouldn't have stuck his hand in the bear trap if he didn't think he could get it back out again."

"What Kobin thinks and what's true are two different things. This is a gamble and you know it." Grim leaned forward, her voice softening. "Are you sure you want to risk this?"

For a moment Sam saw the situation as Grim did: an aggressive commander, frustrated and irrational, making a bad call in a desperate attempt to save his mission. An elaborate op that rested on the competence of a hyperactive strung-out compulsive liar of an arms dealer.

And then he saw again Kostiuk's dusty attic parlor, patterned in chartreuse and white, and Kobin watching him with desperate eyes. _I know I can count on you._

"We go with Kobin's plan," he declared.

Grim sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them and said, "I'll map the convoy."


	5. Interlude: In This Together

Kobin found out they were in trouble when his head hit the starboard wall of the holding cell hard enough to nearly send him back unconscious. Pain ripped through his skull and he curled up reflexively, one hand going to his split skin and wiping away blood. Another jolt sent him off the bed entirely and he scrambled to his feet, dizzily trying to figure out if he were still asleep.

A long shudder rippled through Paladin's fuselage around him, and then he heard a truly day-ruining sound: the whine of fuel pumps spooling down.

Well, shit.

Alarms screamed. Paladin shuddered again and his stomach dropped in free-fall. He staggered and grabbed for the bars of the cell. They were plummeting. His pulse pounded in his ears. They were falling out of the sky and he was trapped in a cage and he couldn't get out and--

A crash of steel yanked his attention away. The nose pitched up sharply and most of gravity returned, but the slant of the decking told him they were still headed to a high-speed rendezvous with the ocean. In the chaos of alarms and lights and sirens he spotted a familiar silhouette lurching towards him.

"Hey, let me guess!" he yelled. "We're totally fucked!"

Fisher made it to the door of the cell. "Virus killed the systems. Pilot's unconscious," he answered. His voice had flattened into monotone mission-robot mode.

"Shit! What happened to the copilot?"

"He's flying manually, but--" The plane jumped and dropped again, neatly finishing Fisher's statement. Of course that was why he'd come; because Kobin was useful, again.

Damn right he was. As if Fisher would know what to do in this kind of situation. "Plane like this, it's a two-man job, yeah. Okay." _Okay. Shit. Focus._ "Kill the power, kill the backup generator, flash the whole system amd reboot clean," he thought aloud. "Even if it's hardware-based it'll take some time to reinfect. Okay." It wasn't a good plan but it was a plan and right now that was more than anyone else seemed to have. "I gotta get to the flight deck," he said half to himself, pushing against the door of the cell, surprised for a moment when it didn't respond. "Ah, Fisher, lemme out of here."

The man, to his astonishment, hesitated.

 _Then why the fuck did you bother coming!?_ Kobin wanted to shout, but instead he dropped his voice low and careful, trying to match that calm robot. "Fisher. Let me out of here."

That did the trick. Fisher unlocked the door and swung it open. "I'll take care of the power," he said as he did.

"Aft," barked Kobin in reply, then wondered if he should explain more; but Fisher seemed to get it. It took a moment to find his balance on the shivering deck. He turned halfway out of the brig as the thought occurred to him and added, "Dump some cargo while you're down there, it'll buy us some time!"

Ops was chaos. Grim looked up from her station against one wall; he couldn't figure out what she was doing until he spotted the bright orange box of the flight recorder. Leaving a message. Of course Grim would think of that. No one had prepped Paladin for rough air and tablets and trash and pistol magazines sloshed rattling along the fuselage with every bump. He bounced from console to console, darting across in the moments of stillness.

Charlie had braced himself against the table set near the stairs to the flight deck and typed frantically on a laptop. "What are you doing out!?" he yelled as Kobin ran past.

"Saving your ass, kid," shouted back Kobin. He caught the railing and raced up the stairs, then the ladder. His head swam and he swiped again at the trickle of blood, smeared it back through his hair. The flight deck door swung open on its hinges. Someone had laid out the injured pilot, strapped him down. No time to be polite; he grabbed the headset off the unconscious man, crashed into the cockpit, slid into the left seat and plugged in the jack. Instantly noise flooded his ears, yelling, shouting, crew members relaying information to each other. Grim's voice wove through it, ordering something to do with the SMI. Okay. She would fix that. It was his job to keep them all alive long that she could.

Paladin's control panels were laid out differently from the standard C-147, differently enough to make him hesitate over the switches. As he paused the copilot suddenly seemed to notice him and barked, "Who the hell are you!?"

"Does it really fucking matter?" snarled Kobin. Okay, wait, they hadn't actually done much, just shifted everything over a dozen centimeters to make way for a new anodized-green panel that controlled, he guessed, all of Fisher's shiny classified toys. Okay. This he knew. The needle on the altimeter was whipping downwards alarmingly fast. "What's our descent rate?"

"Thousand feet a minute," said the copilot.

"Shit! What the fuck is our glide ratio!?"

"Twenty to one, but we're not getting that--"

"No shit!"

"--no power to flaps, slats, nothing."

"Tell me we at least have mechanical controls."

"Barely. Fly-by-wire has a hardware cutoff and we've still got hydraulics, but Paladin's unstable in pitch and roll so--"

"How the fuck did someone build a cargo plane that's unstable in two axes!?"

"So it's taking all my attention to keep it level," the copilot finished loudly.

"Alright. Alright." Kobin scanned the panel again, reordering that shutdown checklist. Mechanical linkages meant hydraulics would have to be the last to go. "Give me a read every thousand. Alright. Let's fucking do this."

Electrical went first, since it was doing jack shit anyway. Nav, so the copilot didn't have to fight it. Radio, which operated on quite a few more frequencies than he was used to. After a few seconds staring at the extra glossy green panel he found a pair of red-covered EMERGENCY CUTOFF switches and threw them both without further consideration; Charlie could sort out whatever the fuck he'd just broken if they all lived another ten minutes.

"Seven thousand," announced the copilot.

Chatter in his headset. White wisps of cloud fogged the view before them. Kobin clicked the transmit switch and radioed, "Guys, we're about to hit some rough air, you better strap in."

 _"Not an option!"_ he heard Fisher answer, sounding strained.

Kobin shrugged. Well, Fisher had a pretty hard skull. He returned to his checklist. Internal comms, no, leave those. Ventilation, pressurization, off - have to trust the pressure vessel to keep them all conscious for a few more minutes, they'd be at sea level soon anyway--

"Six thousand."

Paladin lurched, upwards for a change; the copilot swore as the yoke tried to shake itself from his grip, but he wrestled the nose up to a better angle of attack and the spinning needle on the altimeter slowed a fraction. Fisher must have kicked something big out of the cargo bay. He clicked comms again. There was probably a command-only loop, well, fuck if he were going to look for it. "Okay, Fisher, here's the deal," he said as he ran his hands underneath the control panel. A latch; he pulled and twisted. The avionics master control bay slid out in a long flat drawer. Every LED he could see blinked a rapid red, drawing off the emergency batteries tucked in next to the master computer. "You gotta cut the power so we can flash the system, you gotta do it now. With engines out we're running on the backup generator. It's under the subfloor, below the SMI. Get there and just kill everything."

_"How the hell do you know where the backup generator is?"_

"You left me in ops, I got bored." Number pad on the left side of the horizontal panel. "Avionics bay access code," he barked at the copilot.

"Niner-three-five-six-seven," said the copilot. "Wait. What the hell are you doing to the drives?"

"The only way we're getting command back is to wipe the whole OS and reinstall," said Kobin as he punched in the code. One of the red lights flicked green and the back of the bay popped up.

The copilot stared at him in horror. "Are you insane!? She's dead in the water while the computers boot!" Underneath the panel lay a row of slim silver hard drives, each one slotted on its side. Kinda like toast in a toaster. Man. Toast would be pretty awesome right now. Damn copilot was still yammering, though. "That's a ground-only procedure! The system safeguards won't let you in!"

"Which is why we're gonna shut 'em down," answered Kobin as he yanked the drawer out further. There it was, black rectangle at the very back. "Kill power completely and Paladin won't know it's in flight."

"Because it _won't be!"_

"Just till we reboot." The black SSD was triple-sealed and marked READ-ONLY in five languages. He flipped it gleefully between his fingers. Clean, validated, mathematically verified flight software. Good old military redundancy.

The cockpit flickered. Panels went dark. Emergency controls lit up, hydraulics, lights, comms. Battery backup-backup.

 _"Kobin, generator's offline,"_ radioed Sam.

"Alright, good," he said, then nearly laughed. Good! Great! Everything was fine. The batteries would dump their charge in about sixty seconds and then Paladin would be a hundred and fifty tons of soon-to-be-ground-level aluminum. The plummeting altimeter read five thousand. The copilot wanted to argue but his own yoke was fighting him and all his attention went to that. How many degrees should he dive the plane? His mind raced. Steeper would mean greater velocity, ram more air into the starving engines. Shallower would mean more altitude, more time for the engines to start up. Kobin gripped the yoke and then remembered that Fisher was probably still underneath the floor.

"Hang on to something, man, I gotta take her into a steep dive," he warned. "And get your ass to the cockpit, I need your help with startup."

 _"What--"_ said Fisher, and then the radio died.

Batteries discharged. The cockpit blacked out. They had gone ballistic.

Kobin shoved the captain's yoke forward and pitched Paladin down towards the waves.

"What the hell do you think you're doing!?" the copilot shouted at him as Kobin's command overrode his own. Wind screamed past the cockpit windows.

"Just keep her on that slope!" snapped Kobin. He fished out the red data cable and stabbed the plug straight through the plastic seals. With every amp of power disconnected Paladin shouldn't know this was anything other than a standard software change. Kobin tried to beam soothing thoughts towards the avionics. _You're on the ground, everything is fine, you're getting a routine system wipe, we're definitely not all about to die..._

A string of red LEDs lit up underneath the small monitor set into the panel. One turned green. White text scrolled on the black screen. Kobin nearly whooped for joy until he read it: _ENGAGE AVIONICS REBOOT SAFETIES._

"Wait, what? What the fuck!?" he muttered to himself. "What the shit is this?"

"I told you, it won't let you in!" said the copilot.

"Fuck that!" shouted Kobin. He ran his hand over the bay, then over the control panels in front of him. In the lower left, under a plastic shield, a row of covered thumb switches. One said _Master Clear A_ and he nearly tore the cover off and jammed down the toggle. The monitor in the control bay blatted at him, but the message remained.

Shit. Fuck. God fucking _dammit_. "Fisher, what the hell's taking you so long?!" he shouted into the radio. They needed a third. Sam needed to be here. Wait, shit - there was another switch. _Master Clear B._ He jammed that one down too. Some of the red LEDs went green and more text scrolled: _ENTER ACCESS CODE._

"What the shit is this!?" he yelled at the copilot. "What's the code!?"

"I can't let you wipe the system, it's the only thing that can keep us in the air!"

"Do you hear that!?" yelled Kobin, jabbing a finger over one shoulder.

"What?" Confusion. "No?"

"Fucking _exactly_ , you moron! The fuel pumps aren't running. The engines aren't running. _Nothing_ is running!"

The copilot stared at him with a mixture of terror and blankness. Oh, shit. He'd done that thing that other people did sometimes when they panicked: he'd seized up and decided to cling, illogically, to the few rules he knew instead of actually dealing with the fucking situation. Kobin might have to hit him, and that would take a lot of time. God _damn_ but other people sucked.

"What's the problem?" said a steady mission-robot voice, and for the second time in his life Andriy Kobin was happy to hear Sam Fisher show up.

"He wants to reinstall the whole system mid-flight," said the copilot.

"Yeah, I'd be done by now if this jackass would get out of my way," snapped Kobin.

"He'll crash the plane!" whined the co-pilot.

"What the _fuck_ do you think is about to happen!?" yelled Kobin incredulously.

"Let him at it," ordered Fisher.

The copilot looked at Fisher in disbelief, but when his commander didn't flinch he looked away and typed something on a panel Kobin couldn't see. The rest of the LEDs went green. "It's active," he muttered.

"Okay." More text, scrolling, blinking. Green lights. A _progress bar_ , thank god, he'd never been so happy to see one. One time he'd seen a video where someone tried to upload a DVD before the physical copy hit the ground. Funny how these things worked out. "Okay. Alright. Fisher, you gotta pump fuel back into the engines. If I get this thing back online we're gonna have seconds to fire it up."

" 'If'?" echoed Fisher.

"Four thousand," read the copilot.

"Just pump the damn fuel!"

"Manual controls are there," added the copilot. Kobin heard metal clattering aside. The monitor went black and the LEDs blinked out. "Ready," said Fisher.

Kobin tossed a glance over his shoulder, saw the man braced at the controls. "Once I reboot you gotta pull back hard, okay," he said. "We're gonna get one shot at this!"

"On your mark," Fisher answered. Steady as if he were on the beach somewhere, shit, what a robot. Thank every god for robot Fisher.

The screen lit. "Mark!"

Metal screeched behind him as Fisher hauled back on the handle, then shoved it forwards. Kobin strained to hear the slosh of fuel running through the lines and washing into the startup generator that wrapped around each jet engine. Too early and the generator wouldn't start. Too late and it wouldn't matter how much thrust they had. Fisher worked the pump again. The balance of the plane shifted just a fraction as weight moved out into the wings. Again. Waiting for Kobin to make the call. To do his part.

"Two and a half!" shouted the copilot. "Thirty seconds and we're under!" Thirty seconds before they were falling so fast nothing could save them.

What the hell, eh?

"Engine start!" he shouted and shoved the throttle to the stops.

Pumps spun and choked on empty lines. The startup generators drew fuel, grumbled, drove power into four massive turbofans.

"Come on, come on," he muttered in a kind of prayer. Electrical levels spiked. Falling air rammed into the inlets and pressurized the compressors. The port outboard sputtered, then died. Nested shafts tried to spool up. "Come on, come on, _come on!"_ Port outboard sputtered again, caught.

Lit.

"We're getting power!" shouted the copilot.

Four enormous fans screamed back to life. He pulled the yoke straight back into his sternum. Paladin groaned and shuddered. Waves filled the cockpit windows.

"Two thousand!"

"Come on, you bitch, come on, pull up--"

The nose pitched but a rock didn't stop falling just because it pointed up--

"Fifteen hundred, we're still dropping!"

_"--pull up, pull up, pull up--!!"_

And the ocean was rising--


	6. Seek First To Understand

That Mossad drone was an impressive beast. Sam didn't even notice it till it smashed headlong into the apex of the roof and tumbled down to hit the ops center floor with a resounding boom.

"Sorry!" shouted Charlie from the far end of the fuselage. "Sorry, sorry, just, uh, working out the kinks." A nearly inaudible whine of propellers and the drone scooted along the floor. Its adaptive camo turned it into a jumble of desperate shapes as it attempted to copy the decking, a console, and a chair wheel in rapid succession. "Not the most intuitive controls," he explained as he climbed the stairs to ops. A sleek black-and-chrome headset encircled his skull and dropped a heads-up display into his field of vision. He twitched a hand wrapped in a matching haptic glove. The drone's props flared again and it flopped to one side like a wounded bird.

"Charlie, why don't you take that outside," snapped Sam without looking away from the aerial photography of Kostiuk's dacha.

"Oh - uh, sure, Sam. Right." The props wound down. The adaptive camo shivered away to reveal matte white surfaces. Sam picked up the drone around what he thought was its midsection and carried it himself to one of Paladin's side doors, down the stairs and into the wide space of the hangar, just in case Charlie got "distracted" along the way. The tech trailed unhappily behind him. He set it upright on what was probably the tail and left it. As he walked back to the ladder a crash echoed through the building, followed rapidly by another, "Sorry!"

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbed at his brow. The stim tabs could keep him upright, but they did nothing for the headache. Ops' lighting hadn't exactly been chosen to be easy on the eyes. Even with the chemicals he knew he'd have to rack out for a few hours soon anyway. No sense in planning the op if he couldn't stay awake for it.

In a way he wasn't needed here at all. Grim was a far sight better of an ops coordinator than he knew he would ever be, given that he had somehow skipped straight from operator to commander. But as with so many other Fourth Echelon missions, he had ordered it, and now he felt responsible for it.

"By the way, we have confirmation that it's Kobin's fingerprints on both the burner phone and the taser," said Grim when he returned. "Not that it tells us much more than we already know." Geometric shapes bloomed in the SMI's depths like water stirring at the bottom of a well.

Sam gestured towards it. "I hope that means we're getting somewhere."

Grim waved her hands in an oblique invocation. A golden tree grew up out of the mulch of data, forking halfway up. "We're going with a two-pronged approach," explained Grim. One of the branches flickered white. "First we have to set up the ambush of the convoy."

"Progress on that?"

"Best place for an ambush is probably the bottleneck here." A satellite view of the Black Sea coast, focusing in. "The convoy will be forced to take this road along the coast. The area's mostly deserted farmland, but right here the highway goes through a narrow canyon. It's right in the middle of Kostiuk's territory, so he should be able to scramble his people on short notice with little fear of fallout if things should go wrong."

"And the second part?"

The first branch dimmed, gave way to the second. "Then we have to set up the ambush of Kostiuk. The man's careful about making enemies, but anyone of his stature is going to have rivals. Within the government itself our mostly likely candidate is General Radomir Shevchenko. Shevchenko's hands aren't exactly clean either, but his crimes are more office politics than megalomania."

"What a set of winners," muttered Sam.

"Shevchenko's the current minister for defense, and he wouldn't mind if Kostiuk stopped redirecting military contracts to his own shoddy manufacturing operations," continued Grim, as Shevchenko's face floated up to the surface of the SMI. "Plus the man seems to just not like Kostiuk particularly much. He was Soviet Army when Kostiuk was KGB, so there's little love lost there. He's moderate, not particularly pro-Western, but he wouldn't lose any supporters if he were to be applauded by the US for preventing nuclear proliferation. He's our best chance for an ally."

"An ally," echoed Sam, and his tone stopped the room cold. "This is our ally?" Grim returned his gaze with equanimity. "A thug whose greatest advantage is that he's not quite as much of a corrupt, murdering asshole as his colleagues?"

"Yes," replied Grim coolly.

"This whole government's rotten," said Sam, scowling. "Forget Kostiuk. They all deserve to go."

The only sound in ops was the hum of a dozen fans as the electronics breathed.

"Sam, I'm going to go get some coffee," said Grim. Not a muscle moved in her expression. "Why don't you join me?"

Sam followed her forward to the crew mess without a word. He couldn't see Grim's face, but the ramrod-straight bearing of her spine was all he needed to know she wasn't pleased.

Ollie was in the curtained coffee niche filling up his Army Rangers mug, but when he caught sight of Grim's expression he all but squeaked and fled. Grim stepped within and Sam moved opposite her, facing each other across the meter and a half space.

Sam spoke first. "Alright. What'd I do now?"

"Other than declaring your intention to unilaterally topple the government of Ukraine? Gee, I wonder what could have the crew spooked."

"It's true--"

"Stop acting like a child, Sam," said Grim sharply. "You are the commander of Fourth Echelon, the man the President granted the Fifth Freedom. Please attempt to behave as if you deserve it."

"Grim, it was idle speculation. I was never suggesting we do something."

"Really? And I'm supposed to know that you wouldn't do something so rash? The man who broke into Iranian Special Forces HQ?"

"That was _your op!"_

"And it was necessary then. But I'm not sure you remember what's necessary now."

"I haven't lost sight of the mission. I'm not going to do something like that."

"How do we know?" demanded Grim. "How do we know what you'll wake up tomorrow and decide is in the best interests of law and order? You've been granted a great deal of power, Sam, and we need to be able to trust you with it. Not just me and the rest of the team. The crew, the President, hell, the American people, whether they know it or not. They're trusting you to know where the line is, and right now I don't think you could find it on a goddamned map."

Sam bit down on the angry words that boiled up inside him with the same cold hand that kept him still when his animal instincts sought to flee. Back away from the situation, analyze it without fear, without doubt, without personal investment. No one was watching.

He slumped back against the wall. "God. I'm sorry, Grim."

"Sam, what's going on with you lately? Is there an interest here that you're not telling me about?"

"No. Really, no, Grim. No personal vendettas." She waited while he tried to unwind the snarl of his thoughts. "It was easy with the Engineers," he said at last. "They were killers and they had to be stopped. But the jobs we've done since then... It's driving me insane, these compromises. Trade this warlord for his lieutenant, who isn't quite as bad. Take this guy out, but not that one, because he hasn't technically broken the law. And now this..." He scrubbed his hands through his hair, cropped newly-short, stiff and rough against his skin. "Why is this suddenly bothering me so much?" he asked quietly.

"Because of Kobin," said Grim. "In this line of work you meet three kinds of people: soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives to protect, insane zealots like Sadiq, and complete scum. Kobin's none of those." Grim held out both hands palm-up as if balancing a scale. "He's an asshole, but he wants to help. He sells guns, but it's just business. It's because you _know_ him, Sam. It's not black and white anymore."

"You've been thinking about it too."

Grim allowed her expression to sink into a quiet, haunted look. "Briggs was CIA, he knows about dealing with assets. Charlie's just interested in what he can get away with. But you and I are supposed to look at the big picture. If Kobin isn't a lost cause, then what does that say about the hundreds of people like him that we've taken out in our careers?"

"We save Andriy Kobin and we throw Leonid Kostiuk to the wolves," agreed Sam. "It's the right thing to do, Grim, I know that. But I can't say _why."_

"It's not that you can't pin down the difference between Kobin and Kostiuk. It's that deep down you're afraid there isn't one."

Sam rubbed at his brow again, pressing against the pounding headache. "How did Irving do this?"

"He suffered, Sam. I watched him go through the same thing that's eating you up right now."

"He never let us see it."

"You didn't need to know."

"Goddamn Kobin. Couldn't just stay on the fucking plane. Couldn't just fucking _say_ something when he's getting blackmailed. When we get him back I ought to throw him in the damn holding cell again."

"He gets to you, doesn't he," said Grim, eying him sidelong with an unreadable focus.

"Pretty sure he gets to everyone."

"He _annoys_ everyone, yeah. But you're the one whose buttons he knows how to push."

"That's not true."

"It really is, Sam. Never seen anyone get you to lose your cool faster than him. He's got a special interest in provoking you."

"Guess I'm just lucky. Or he's got a death wish."

"Maybe he does," said Grim, far more seriously than he'd meant it. "Maybe it's both."

"What?"

Grim shrugged. "Thinking out loud," she said in that voice that meant he was getting nothing further.

"So," said Sam, meeting her eyes. "We good?"

"We're good, Sam," she said, with a rare white flash of a smile. "Just keep what I said in mind. Okay?"

"Yes ma'am. Will do my best to emulate a responsible human being."

"Good," said Grim with mock gravity. She held the curtain aside for him to step out. "Charlie needs someone to look up to."

"Charlie needs flying lessons," said Sam.

"That thing's built from a nanofabbed titanium honeycomb," said Grim as they headed aft. "It's virtually impossible to damage."

"Charlie is a very talented individual."

"That...is true," said Grim, frowning.

"Probably a good thing Kobin isn't here right now to see what he's doing to it."

"Probably," agreed Grim. "You still want to go tonight? To do the meet?"

"Of course," said Sam.

"It's just in and out. If you want to rest up for tomorrow, Briggs can do it--"

"I'll go," said Sam firmly. "I need to get a read on Kobin's state of mind."

"Right," said Grim, with another of those unreadable looks. "Then you'd better hit your bunk soon." She held up her wrist, where a new smartwatch glowed in white and green. Charlie had spent an absurd amount of time designing electronic watchfaces that would match Paladin's displays. "Coming up on the six-hour limit."

 "In a few," said Sam.

When he stepped into ops no one looked his way, but the noise level dropped perceptibly. He walked calmly to the SMI and retrieved Grim's briefing materials. She stood across from him, arms folded, face impassive.

"Get me everything we have on Shevchenko," said Sam, loud enough that everyone could hear. "Let's make sure he'll play ball before we open up back channels."

Ops let out a kind of deep collective breath, and went to work.

* * *

He woke without anything in between him and sleep, just a sudden snap into awareness. The usual pre-mission routine: stretch, shower, shave. Across the cabin's floor he stepped in a series of delicate exercises, feeling all the muscles of his body, waking up that deep physical awareness. Motion, weight, place. Gabrielova had put his tray out in the mess as usual, six thousand calories under tinfoil to keep the heat in, and he ate it all without stopping. He swallowed the small mix of candy-coated pills he'd counted out beforehand - this one to stay awake, this one to stay alert, this one to focus - checked the time and drank exactly 16 ounces of coffee. He would have just enough time to relieve himself before they drove out.

When he climbed the ladder to Charlie's loft Briggs was already sitting in the workshop, feet up on one of the benches. As Sam pulled himself up over the edge of the floor he heard the man saying, "There is no way Sloane is up to anything good. Sloane is _never_ up to anything good."

"It was the Rambaldi tech he was obsessed with the whole time," retorted Charlie without looking away from whatever delicate apparatus he had under the blinding bright circle of his work lamp. Sam suppressed a sigh. Briggs and Charlie were, apparently, several layers deep into an intense argument about the absurd spy show both of them had gotten addicted to back in Paris, when the entire plane had come down with the flu. "Rambaldi tells him to play nice, he'll play nice."

"He's obsessed with power. The Rambaldi stuff was just the outlet for it. He's gonna turn on them, man, it's inevitable." Briggs looked over as Sam went past them into the armory proper, pulling out his gear bags. "I got my kit," he called, tapping a finger against the case that held his favorite sniper rifle where it leaned against his chair. "You want me to bring anything along in the van?"

Sam paused. It was a straightforward in-and-out, no target, no payload. "The intercept gear," he said at last. "Might be important folks at Kostiuk's place. We could hear something useful."

"Guess I better brush up on my Russian," said Briggs.

"What happened to that app?" said Charlie, looking up.

"I tried the Google Translate one, but the voice recognition's shit."

"Ah, man, I could have told you that. I've been working on an upgraded version that's slaved to Paladin for faster processing, but the pickup on the OPSAT's still just not good enough." At the sound of Sam zipping up his gear bag Charlie switched off the work lamp and swiveled round in his chair. "Sam, cooked up a couple toys for you," he said. "Well, technically for Kobie."

"What've you got?" said Sam.

Charlie held up a tiny silver capsule between his thumb and forefinger. "This one's a tracker so we don't lose him again. Get him to swallow it. And this little beauty..." He reached over and extricated the device he'd been working on. Out of the armature of clamps and cables emerged a hard black rectangle about the size of a credit card. The very end of one corner had been clipped off. Sam took it and flipped it over, then on its edge. It couldn't be more than a few millimeters thick. He glanced up at Charlie with a raised eyebrow.

"Concealed stun gun," said Charlie proudly.

"No way," said Briggs.

"Totally yes way," said Charlie. He tapped the clipped corner. "There's a spring coil in there, launches a copper dart almost as fast as a bullet. The second it hits skin the high-energy-density capacitor in the body will dump enough charge to drop pretty much anyone in their tracks." He ran a fingernail along the bottom till it bumped against a nearly invisible seam. "To fire, press down here, then press and slide back with your other hand here."

"Nice work," said Sam, reluctantly impressed.

"Thanks," said Charlie, beaming. "I got the idea from capacitive touchscreens."

Sam opened his mouth, but then his brain reminded him that there were very few answers likely to leave him any more illuminated. Instead he asked, "How many shots?"

Some of the glee left Charlie's face. "Just one," he said, shifting back and forth. "It's, uh, it's kind of a prototype at the moment. Not really ready for showtime? But it's all I could pull together in the concealed weapons department on such short notice. If you want to wait a few more hours I could maybe jury-rig--"

"I'm sure this'll be fine," interrupted Sam. He tucked the killer credit card into a side pocket on his gear bag. Charlie dropped the silver pill into a plastic baggie and Sam stowed it in the same pouch.

"I figured Kobie would feel better with a weapon," said Charlie. "Even if it's a last resort."

"I think you figured right." Sam shifted his gaze to Briggs, who stood.

"I'll grab the intercept gear," he said. "Meet you at the van."

They had left midnight far behind, and as Sam drove the nondescript panel van out of Donetsk the city lights quickly gave way first to suburbs, then to large stretches of dark, open countryside. Heavy clouds had moved in and Sam could see the distant lights of towns making yellow islands on their undersides. In the passenger seat Briggs paged through the background briefing material on a little tablet as they went, its pale blue glow painting the underside of his face.

"There's coal mines under all this," he said.

"Huh," said Sam. "It does look a bit like Pennsylvania."

"And apparently 'curative mud.' "

"Curative mud."

"Hey man, I didn't write this."

"What's it cure?"

"Just, you know, curative. In general."

"Any mud?"

"This one lake."

"Is there a hotel there?"

"Big one."

"Of course."

"Lot of smaller mineral springs too. I bet that's why Kostiuk's dacha is out here. They're popular vacation spots."

"Did you download the Fodor's Guide to Ukraine?"

" 'Scuse me for trying to broaden my horizons. I've never been to Ukraine before. So far all I've gotten to see is a warehouse and darkness."

"It's big. There's a lot of grass. Factories, too. The Crimea's a fucking nightmare. There you go, Ukraine."

"Sam, I do not understand how you manage to make flying all over the world in a secret Bat-plane fighting terrorists sound boring." Briggs tapped his tablet a few times. His eyebrows rose. "Apparently in Sevastopol they train dolphins to plant mines on ships."

"Great," said Sam. "One day I'm going to have to fight a dolphin."

"See? Now you're prepared."

They parked near the same turn-off they had used before, after Briggs had gone ahead and confirmed that no one else had scoped out the spot after they'd left. Sam sat with the van's side door open and donned his suit. The familiar snug fit jumpstarted all his mission instincts. He adjusted his gear, all the straps and bands and zips, made sure it all lay flat and nothing swung loose to shine or click. Behind him Briggs was setting up the intercept gear, unfolding feathery antennas and sticking them to the roof with big round magnets.

"Charlie, you getting the feeds?" radioed Briggs.

 _"Loud and clear,"_ said Charlie. _"Sam, I should be able to relay through here as well, if you need any data while you're out."_

"Got it," said Sam. He studied again the map on the tablet before him. Charlie had finally "acquired" the construction blueprints for Kostiuk's dacha, but there was no guarantee that what had been filed had anything to do with what was actually there. He closed his eyes and drew the map in his mind, turned it around, flipped it upside down, made sure he knew how to get to every room. The chemical cocktail sang in his blood and all around him the countryside was loud with nightlife singing, buzzing, crying, clicking to each other. Briggs climbed on top of the van to attach one more big magnet, sealing itself to the roof with a _thunk_. The thick overcast hid the moon but diffused the cityglow across the sky, projecting a faint and uniform grey light.

Briggs jumped back down just as Sam stood, stretching again, testing the fit. The adrenaline built in his veins. Every nerve lit up with clear purpose. He touched the inner pocket where he had stowed Charlie's gifts, then tapped one finger behind his ear.

"Grim. Moving out," he said, waded out into the field, then dropped into the grass and began the crawl. When he glanced back he saw Briggs watching him for a few minutes. Then the man turned away and returned to his eavesdropping.

* * *

The dacha looked much quieter tonight, its lights dimmed now, its driveway less crowded. Two men were walking a perimeter with four more stationed farther afield. Slipping between their fields of coverage was barely a challenge and the two pacing sentries smoked cigarettes that marked them out in the night. This time Sam slipped in through the cellar doors after a moment's work on the old padlock with one of Charlie's new bump keys.

 _"Wow, they are big into death metal around here,"_ said Briggs in his ear. _"There yet?"_

"Just made it inside," whispered Sam, after an infrasonic ping confirmed he was alone in the cellar. He stood. It seemed, much to his surprise, like a normal cellar. No hidden bunkers or torture chambers or panic rooms. Just the sort of aimless wooden furniture and boxes of old magazines that seemed to sprout in the basement of every vacation home, no matter when or where. "By the way, there's a little pool out back."

_"Mineral spring. Called it."_

"Yeah, don't let it go to your head. Anything on the airwaves besides the lineup for Ukrainian Idol?"

_"First of all, it's Eurovision here, and second of all, holy god do they take that shit seriously. But, more relevantly, the guys in the dacha only have short-range walkie-talkies and they're barely speaking. Swapping patrols, 'all clear,' low-key chatter."_

"Any place they're checking in particular?"

_"One of them made what I think was a joke about a bedroom a while back."_

"Saw a lot of unused bedrooms last time I was here," said Sam. "Maybe he stashed Kobin in one of those."

_"Look for a door with goons in front of it, I guess. From the radio chatter I estimate there's only three guys awake in the house right now."_

Sam crept up the dusty cellar stairs to the first floor - dark now, lights extinguished, only a lamp in the kitchen and another in a hallway to break up the shadow. In the kitchen he checked the cardboard boxes of groceries that had been stacked haphazardly on counters and tables: supplies to feed about ten men cheaply, plenty of coffee to keep them awake. The air reeked of ethanol and he found the open vodka bottle near the sink, a third of its level drained already. He suspected that hadn't come in with the official supplies.

Laughter and loud Slavic syllables echoed from somewhere in the house. Sam slipped along the hallway towards the sound and light. The floor was the same honey-colored hardwood as upstairs, the planks narrow and uneven, covered here and there by faded rag-rugs. There were indeed three men awake in the dacha, and they were clustered around a folding table with a pot of mixed coins and bills in the center, playing what sounded like an elaborate variant of poker. They had set the table up in the middle of the hallway with one of its edges pressed right up against a door. Sam paused to pulse out another wave of infrasound. One human, curled up, lying behind that door.

Sam withdrew to the kitchen and considered his next move. He had the means to put all three men down, but every one would leave its trace, and someone might put the pieces together. He needed a distraction to draw the men away from their post. Perhaps if he called up Briggs and had him trigger an alarm at the perimeter--

The poker conversation swung upwards in volume. Sam froze and listened reflexively, hidden in a shadowed corner of the kitchen. Ukrainian was close enough to Russian for him to make out the gist of the sentence: everyone wanted more vodka, no one wanted to get up and fetch it.

No time to think. Sam darted towards the sink even as one hand found the white tablets in a pocket. He popped their blister pack and ground them on the counter with the butt of his pistol, fast as he could without making a sound, then swept up the resulting powder and tipped it into the vodka bottle. The white cloud floated suspended for a moment, then dissolved into the clear liquor. The old hardwood floor creaked under someone's weight. Sam smudged away the rest of the powder on the counter and slipped back into his hiding place just as the loser of the argument wandered into the kitchen. The man didn't bother with the light, just grabbed the bottle by its neck and hastened back to his game.

Sam checked the time on the OPSAT's polarized screen, then leaned back and counted heartbeats.

After five minutes the poker game began to quiet down. After seven it went silent, but Sam waited the full ten before he ventured to the hallway again. One of the three men had staggered into another room before he had passed out; the other two lay face-down opposite each other, drooling onto the plastic folding table. He edged around the side of the table opposite the door and pulled, gently. It bumped forward along the floor, the two sleepers barely stirring as Sam ducked beneath it and came up in front of the door. It was locked, but only barely, and a few seconds later he pushed it in and slipped inside.

Kostiuk had left Kobin in a bedroom, but he had done so without so much as a blanket. Kobin was lying curled into a fetal position on the bare mattress, facing away from the door, shivering. Faded wallpaper and old prints covered the walls like the parlor upstairs. _The whole place really is like this,_ he thought absurdly. _Ukrainian Mobster Vintage Beachhouse Chic._

Sam crept around to the opposite side of the bed and knelt so that he was eye-level with Kobin. The man looked about as bad as Sam had last seen him. He was still wearing the white shirt and thin dark pants from Thursday morning. Recollection flickered and all at once Sam knew where he'd seen that collared shirt with its elaborate red embroidery before: Kobin had been wearing something much like it the day Sam had broken into his home in Malta on the trail of his daughter's killer. Seeing it here made him feel like he was seeing double, seeing an old and ugly memory imposed over the present. Dull grey not-light came in through a high window on one wall - bolted shut from the outside, Sam noted, and wired with a motion detector - and fell across Kobin's face. For a moment the sight held him, oddly compelling: Kobin at rest, a state so rarely seen. Without his buzzing energy he seemed smaller, less real. Breakable. Vulnerable.

One sleeve of Kobin's shirt had ripped partway at the shoulder seam; in whatever scuffle had happened at the warehouse, most likely. A tattoo marked the bicep beneath, a gear broken in half. That one was new. Sam knew that because Kobin had come back to Paladin with a bandage over it and bitched every time anyone so much as brushed against his arm for the next two weeks. He'd showed it to Sam when the bandage came off.

_"Why do you think I care about your tattoo," he said flatly._

_Kobin only grinned. "It's for the Engineers."_

_Sam frowned, caught off-guard. "Why?"_

_"Cause fuck 'em, that's why."_

He wondered what Kobin was dreaming about.

* * *

_Libya was utter shit this time of year. The word "March" on the calendar meant nothing to the tropical sun that beat down mercilessly over Benghazi. The winds blew out of the Sahara laden with desert heat and fine, gritty sand that got in his nose and mouth and made everything taste like dirt. Libya was shit and he hated being here, which was why he was here, because it was (probably, hopefully) the last place anyone would come looking for him. But even though he had gone out into the city only shortly after dawn the heat still battered hard against him and in his mind he repeated exactly how much he hated Libya._

_He had ditched his usual professional attire - his fine tailored suit, his embroidered silk shirts - for something that he hoped might blend better in this shithole place he did not want to be, and he missed it all sorely. Image was important when going into a negotiation. Right now he did not project a very good image. That was bad. Why hadn't he brought a hat? He'd had time to buy one. He didn't dare tap the bulk of his Libyan clientele, not at a time like this, so it had taken him a few days' work to suss out the appropriate building in the Benghazi slums. Now he stood in front of the courtyard and the sweat that ran down his neck and back had nothing to do with the heat. Good thing he'd already gone to take a piss._

_He nodded to the beggar who sat on the steps (almost certainly not a beggar, almost certainly armed) and walked into the courtyard with a false, lurching bravado. It felt like walking down a hill, as if now that he had started moving he couldn't stop. The three valiums he'd swallowed before he could leave his hotel room mingled uncomfortably with the pint of vodka that had already been in his stomach, shifted in unease at the remnants of the amphetamines that had kept him moving after Guam. After that long disastrous night reading the reports about Andersen and, inch by sickening inch, making the connections._

_He threw open the wooden door and walked into the dusty tile of the atrium without flinching. The valium made a white glass wall between him and the world, him and his body and its fear. The man sitting at the desk looked up in mild surprise._

_"Can I help you?" he asked in Arabic, then, measuring his visitor, repeated himself in English._

_"I want to talk to CIA," declared Kobin. "Go get your boss."_

_"Sir, I'm not certain what you--"_

_"Don't play cute with me, kid," snapped Kobin. "And don't think about grabbing the M16 you've got under that desk, either." He raised his voice and hoped the inevitable cameras had audio pickups. "This is CIA station HQ for Libya, your station chief is Oskar Mikalos, and in case you still want to play dumb, tell him that Andriy Kobin wants a fucking word."_

_The man stood up without even making a second attempt to keep cover. Amateur. Explained why he was stuck sitting at a reception desk. "Sir. I'm going to have to ask you to leave now," he said, one hand still hidden behind the desk._

_"What'd I tell you about that rifle, kid?" said Kobin. He dropped a hand into a pocket of his own jacket and hoped it didn't tremble. The only things in there were a few reals and a pocket knife._

_"Sir, you need to--"_

_The door behind the desk slammed open and a man barged through it, his black beard sticking out in wild disarray. His shirt was on backwards. He scanned Kobin quickly up and down, then returned to his face, and recognition sparked in dark eyes. Kobin's mood lifted a bit at that, hey, he was high enough on the wanted list to merit memorization of his face._

_"I want to live in Hawaii," he said. He had planned out something else to say (had he? at least he had meant to) but now it had fled and that was the first thing that came to mind. Oskar continued to refuse to hold up his end of the conversation, which was really rude (but CIA so what do you expect), so Kobin added, "I like the beach."_

_"Okay," said Oskar slowly, in a particular calm tone of voice that Kobin recognized as the one people tended to use when they didn't like what he was doing. Maybe they all learned it at the same place. One of those hostage negotiation workshops. His guts were not happy with him. Should have gotten breakfast before doing this, like Oskar apparently had been doing. Speaking of Oskar, he was talking again. "Why don't you come upstairs and we'll talk?"_

_"I'm not going anywhere without a signed guarantee of immunity and protection and I really do want to live in Hawaii," said Kobin. His vision swam in the heat and he felt again that sensation of stumbling down an incline, except he wasn't moving. Was he? The valium had maybe been a bad idea. The desk guy had disappeared at some point in the conversation. What a moron, seriously. "Do you have anything to drink?"_

_And then that invisible incline pitched up and the last thing he registered was how nice and cool the tile floor felt._

* * *

"Kobin," hissed Sam. "Hey. Wake up."

Kobin opened his eyes slowly, then blinked and drew in a deep breath, staring into the darkness. "Fisher?" he whispered, a desperate hope in his voice.

Sam lifted the sonar goggles to expose his face. "You expecting someone else?"

"The guards?"

"Asleep for now."

"Thank god," he murmured. "You have to get me out of here."

Sam's blood chilled. "You have to stay in, Andriy. You know that. This is your op."

Kobin clutched at his hand. "Please. Don't. Please don't leave me here." His eyes were glassy, unfocused, and his voice slurred as though he had been drinking. "Get me a blanket or something. Please, I'm freezing, I'm going to die in here."

"I can't risk it. They find something in here that isn't supposed to be and it could blow the whole damn thing."

Kobin let go of his hand and sat up. He blinked a few times, some sense coming into his eyes. "I know, I know," he said, clearer now. "Sorry. It's hard to think. It's just so fucking cold."

 _"Sam, your suit's external temp is reading fifty-three degrees,"_ said Charlie.

"Thank you, Charlie," said Sam. "Now please fuck off until I call you."

 _"Fucking off, boss."_ The radio went resolutely silent.

"What's Charlie say?" mumbled Kobin.

"Nothing," said Sam quickly. "Alright. Shit. Just--" He pulled himself up onto the mattress next to Kobin and, very carefully, gathered the man up in his arms.

At the first touch Kobin flinched in surprise, but even that movement was sluggish, and he didn't bother to protest when Sam pressed himself against his back and wrapped his arms around him. Even through the suit Sam could feel the chill. Kobin curled up as small as possible, trying to keep the heat in his chest, huddling up against Sam. After a minute he started shivering, and that was when Sam got truly worried; if he'd been too cold to shiver before, he'd already hit stage 2 hypothermia. No wonder he hadn't been thinking straight. Despite himself, his arms tightened. He had to protect him. No, that was ridiculous. Kobin was a grown man, a lunatic, and a professional dirtbag. But he was _Sam Fisher's_ lunatic and professional dirtbag, and no one messed with--

His team.

Sam backed away from that thought as soon as it crossed his mind, but the damage was done. Kobin had his head tucked against his knees and Sam could see the exposed skin along his shoulders, grey shading of tattoo ink, the thick round scar that marred the left. He'd given Kobin that scar in DC, shoving half a broken flagpole through his chest. But now there were persimmons in the galley and a chair in ops nobody else felt comfortable taking and a running crew bet on exactly how many tattoos he had (Doc Nozumi refused to tell), and Sam Fisher was sitting in an empty bedroom in hostile territory trying to keep the man from freezing to death while planning an op that turned on Andriy Kobin's skilled and willing cooperation. The facts were no longer deniable.

Sometimes, he thought, his life got pretty weird.

"Tell Grim about this and you're dead," he murmured to Kobin, and was rewarded with a chuckle. That sounded more like the maniac he knew. "Why'd Kostiuk dump you here?"

"Cause he's an asshole," answered Kobin immediately, and Sam had to smother a laugh. "Doesn't trust me not to take a walk when he's not around."

"He's gone?"

"Back to Donetsk. 'Urgent government business,' " drawled Kobin, somehow managing to pronounce the air-quotes. "Prick."

"At least he left you in the care of his most carefully-selected idiots."

"Hah," said Kobin. "Doubt any of his muscle's on your level, Fisher. Afraid this one's gonna be boring."

"Everyone needs a vacation sometimes," said Sam. "We do this right, we nail Kostiuk to the wall."

"If," murmured Kobin.

Sam relaxed his grip slightly, so that he could lean around and look the man in the face. "Kobin, are you gonna be able to do this?" he asked, flat and calm. "This entire plan depends on you keeping it together. It all hinges on you. So if you can't hack it, you'd better tell me now, or people are going to get killed."

Kobin closed his eyes and leaned back against him. "Damn, Fisher. Your pep talks need work."

"Kobin--"

"I can do it. I'll do it." A little of the old swing came back into his voice. "Asshole needs to find out what happens to people who think they can stuff me in a van." He caught himself, added, "Present company excluded." Kobin turned his head, exposed again the blister of white surgical gauze taped along the side of his neck. Sam caught himself just before his fingertips would have brushed across it.

"They cut the tracker out?" he asked.

Kobin craned his neck in a vain attempt to see what Sam was looking at, then raised his hand to the gauze. "Oh. Yeah. And here." He reached down to his right calf. "No idea how you guys snuck that one on me, by the way. Tossed me into a box to kill the signal and one of his boys did a little impromptu surgery."

"Does it hurt?"

"What the fuck do you think?"

Sam said nothing then, only let Kobin lean back against him and tightened his grip again. "How did it happen?" he asked quietly.

"Kostiuk got in touch with me Wednesday night," said Kobin. He sounded exhausted, weary of the whole affair. Sam suspected he had been rehearsing the events in his head ever since. "I don't know how he got my number, how he even knew I was there. He had info on me."

"KGB records," said Sam. "We found your bag."

"No shit? Thanks, man, I love that bag." His voice was drifting again. "It's the best fuckin' bag. It's got an RFID pouch and there's an insert on one side so you can put a flak plate in...kills your shoulder, but you're strong, you'd do okay with it..."

"Andriy," said Sam, half in warning, half in worry. "Focus."

"Mm. Right. Anyway, he said he'd hand them over for a certain sum. So I went to meet him. I got a shot off, one of his goons knocked me on the head, that was that." He tried to shrug, reflexively, in the circle of Sam's arms. "Hand to hand combat isn't a major job skill in the arms business."

"Why did you go meet Kostiuk alone?" said Sam. It came out sounding vaguely upset.

"Believe it or not, when you blackmail most people, they just pay up. Kostiuk had a bunch of paper that was no use to anyone but me, might as well get some cash out of it. Enough to be worth his time, not enough to provoke me into doing something about it." He tried to lean back again to look at Sam. "I had no reason to think he'd cross me, honest. I didn't even believe he had much of anything. Let alone that he'd sell me out to the Russians."

Sam waited.

"And I might have been maybe a lot drunk at the time," admitted Kobin. The gravity of his situation seemed to hit him once more and he sagged.

"You could have said something."

"Yeah, and have you hand me over to Morlov instead," Kobin muttered to the mattress.

"You're a Fourth Echelon asset," snapped Sam. After all this time, how could Kobin not get that? "I'm not fond of sharing."

Kobin went strangely tense for a moment, then. "Yeah. I guess not," he said, sounding as if he were trying to parse a sentence in a foreign language.

In the silence the dacha's floors creaked, beams groaned as they settled in the cold of night. Two of the men Sam had drugged were evidently snorers. Out here in the fields the rasping song of the crickets drowned out all the rest, chorusing to the low sky. If he strained his ears he could hear the faint crunch of dirt and rustle of cloth as the sentries walked their circles outside. The glow of the window lit up a section of the bare mattress, striped blue and yellowed with age. Kobin lay back, only breathing, absorbing the heat. His muscles loosened fractionally as he warmed. Sam could feel his heartbeat through his chest, hear the movement of air in his lungs. For one still and clear moment Kobin seemed content to simply close his eyes and rest like this. Sam thought that maybe nobody else in the world might exist right now. Everything had disappeared and left them here in a patch of non-light, alone, together.

Kobin stirred. "So let me in on the Ice Queen's brilliant plan to beat up all the bad guys and save the day, huh?" he murmured.

"Who says it's Grim's plan?"

"Fisher."

"We've mapped the convoy's itinerary." Sam shuffled his left wrist to the fore, tilted it so Kobin could read the polarized screen. "Here's the location. Good spot for an ambush. You tell Kostiuk the convoy will pass through there Sunday afternoon around 1800 hours. Fifty trucks and eleven jeeps."

"Fifty?" said Kobin in surprise.

"That's right, you weren't there. Turns out they aren't towing thirty centrifuges. They're towing seven hundred."

"Christ on a motherfucking bike," swore Kobin softly. "That's why the price was so high." He took a deep breath and let it out. "We really can't fuck this up, can we."

"It would not be advisable."

"So what's my part?"

"All you have to do is get Kostiuk out to the scene and make sure he stays there."

"He's not gonna be too calm and collected once things start going to shit."

"I'll handle that."

"What about me?"

"Keep it simple, get him out to the site. Don't take any unnecessary risks. Let us handle the rest of it."

Kobin laughed quietly. Sam could feel it in his chest. "Am I seriously getting a lecture on caution from the guy who stuck his face in a canister full of nerve gas?"

"That was a necessary risk," retorted Sam.

"Sure, okay, Fisher. Whatever you need to believe."

"Just get him out there. Hold on. Charlie sends his regards." Sam shifted to pull the baggie containing the silver capsule from his pocket. Kobin took it with shaky fingers. "Swallow this."

_"Swallow?"_

"Fastest way to get a tracker on you that Kostiuk's people won't find. It's a passive device, only activates if we ping it. Stick close to Kostiuk and we'll follow it straight to him." Kobin sighed, but then dry-swallowed the capsule before Sam had a chance to offer him a drink.

Sam held out the killer credit card. "This is for you to keep. Hide it wherever you can."

"I got a wallet. So far he hasn't emptied my pockets," said Kobin. His fingers closed around it. "What's it do?"

"It's a stungun."

"You're fucking kidding me." Suddenly Kobin's voice got a lot more alert. He turned the credit card over and over in his hands. "Charlie cooked this up?"

"Fires a copper flechette linked to a high-energy-density capacitor. It'll drop anyone you shoot with it."

"Fuck me," said Kobin. He turned it sideways and measured its thickness. "Charlie and I could have done a hell of a lot of business."

"Gonna pretend I didn't hear that."

"How many shots?"

"It's one-use. That's one more shot than they know you have," Sam added as Kobin began to protest. He reached around and tapped the clipped corner. "That's where it fires from." He showed Kobin the firing sequence and made him repeat it till he could do it without thinking.

His OPSAT vibrated, a low silent pulse that he felt in his bones. _"Sam, just got a burst of chatter,"_ said Briggs. _"It's shift change inside the house."_

"Dammit," muttered Sam.

"Mm?"

"Time's up."

"Ще п'ять хвилин," mumbled Kobin.

"We're cutting it too close already." He released his embrace and Kobin lurched forward with an unhappy groan. He huddled up again, but some of that old smug spark had returned to his face.

"When's the convoy coming?" asked Sam.

"Sunday. Tomorrow. Eighteen-hundred hours," answered Kobin at once. "Fifty trucks, armed escort. I make sure Kostiuk shows up."

"If there's trouble?"

"Run the fuck away."

"Good enough," said Sam. His OPSAT pulsed again, more urgently this time. He got off the bed and stood, stretching for a moment before beginning the trek back. When he lowered his arms he caught sight of the desperate fear that had resurfaced in Kobin's expression, the panic.

"Hey," said Sam. He leaned forward and took Kobin's shoulders in both hands, steadying him. Holding his eyes with his. "Andriy. Listen to me. We are not going to leave you here."

Kobin blinked rapidly. "Sorry I didn't tell you," he whispered.

"Get out of this alive and you're forgiven," murmured Sam. "See you Sunday."

"Sunday," repeated Kobin, and pulled back, and Sam disappeared again into the night.

* * *

_"Definitely Sark."_

"He is so not Sark, are you blind? Okay. A. Sark is blond."

_"Kobin's blond."_

"Kind of. Ish. Definitely not as blond as Sark. B. Kobin's got the goatee thing. Sark not only lacks that, he would never, ever, in a million years grow one, because Julian Sark is a man of _taste_ and _class_ and Andriy Kobin has a tattoo of his own name."

_"Maybe if we made him watch the show he'd shave it off."_

"Huh." Briggs paused. "That's a thought."

_"But on the other hand, he'd know about Julian Sark."_

"Oh."

_"Might give him ideas."_

"He does not need any more ideas."

 _"Roger that."_ Charlie sighed. _"Goddammit, if I hear Ukraine's stupid fucking Eurovision song one more time I'm rigging the contest so that, like, Lichtenstein wins."_

"Do France."

_"Why?"_

"I dunno. Theirs is pretty good."

_"Oh my god, are you kidding me? You have got to be kidding me. How can you possibly like that trash over Sweden, dude, you are deaf or something."_

Briggs didn't answer, because he had dropped in a single smooth roll out one of the van's open sides and into the grass, lying flat and looking beneath the vehicle at the shadow that had appeared at the edge of the trees. But a moment later his radio buzzed and Sam said, _"Glad I didn't catch you napping."_

Briggs stood. "You could have phoned ahead."

"I could have," said Sam out loud as he neared the van. Briggs started jabbing the buttons on the tops of the round magnets. They popped loose one by one and he tossed them down into the van. "Any luck?" he asked.

"Kobin's nervous, but he'll do fine," said Sam as he stripped off his field weapons. "He hates Kostiuk more than he's scared of getting killed."

"Hey, whatever works." Briggs folded the antennas' fractal forms back down into flat rods. He closed the last case just as Sam slid the panel door shut and opened the driver's side door. Briggs slid his own panel shut and climbed up into the passenger seat, then thought for a minute.

"Why don't I drive?" he said. "You could catch a nap."

Sam face went blank immediately, flat and cold - but then it softened again.

"Yeah, go ahead," he said. His voice was oddly distant. "Thanks."

Briggs came around to the driver's side and started the van. Twisted the knob for the heater, blew dry hot air through the vents. Sam leaned back and let his thoughts drift. Behind him, he knew, the dacha's guard shift was changing. The new guards would find their comrades asleep, shake them roughly awake, seize the vodka, and the boss would go in to check that Kobin was still there. And he would still be there, curled up on the bed, but when the boss came in he would sit up and talk the man into bringing him a blanket in exchange for telling him where the other bottle of vodka was hidden, of course there's another, where there's one there's always more, hey? And he would grin, and talk, and bargain.

Tires crunched slowly back towards the main road. By the time Briggs reached the asphalt and turned towards Donetsk, Sam was already asleep.


	7. Synergize

Two hours after sunrise the subdermal radio hissed in his bones.

 _"Kostiuk just scrambled major assets near Mariupol',"_ reported Charlie. _"Kobin closed the deal."_

* * *

Paladin hummed with activity. Sam had always thought of himself as the tip of the spear, and now that he could see the world from a commander's vantage he understood just how true that metaphor was. Behind every single operator like him on the ground was a pyramid of support personnel, each level backing up the one above them, all working together seamlessly to ensure that he, one man, Sam Fisher, could do his job.

Now he stood above the whole machine in action and watched it with an entirely new and quiet sense of wonder, seeing not only Grim and Charlie and Briggs but the intel coordinators who moved smoothly around each other to sort and process feeds, to tap contacts, to feed the SMI with maps and photos; the supplymasters bringing in food, water, gasoline, medical supplies, even Gabrielova managing her kitchen with the mechanical efficiency that fed twenty hungry people working round the clock. One time Sam had asked her about it. She had sniffed and said, "I cook for my husband's men on fishing boat, in Bering Sea. Against that, this is nothing. Not even worrying about ice fall on my head."

"I doubt your husband's boat was occasionally seized by Delta Force," Sam had said.

"Them? Nice boys. I made cocoa."

The Mossad drone sketched wide circles near the rafters now. The matte-white form slid through the air with algorithmically-generated ease. Charlie had moved out onto one broad wing of Paladin with a laptop. He typed rapidly, then watched the drone drop and swing into a new pattern; now squares, now figure-8s, now a swift and precise hexagon.

"Is it going to be ready in time?" Sam called up to him from the hangar floor.

"Oh, my god, you have _no idea,"_ said Charlie gleefully. He punched a key and the drone vanished. Even knowing its flight path all Sam could spot was a faint shimmer in the air as its OLED surfaces lagged a fraction behind its motion.

The shimmer disappeared. Sam frowned up at the ceiling and let his eyes unfocus, watching for that hint of motion. Waiting...

A whine of propellers flashed past his ear. He ducked and sprang away as the sudden downdraft washed over his back. The shimmer flipped a lazy spiral in the air and came to rest at eye level a few meters away, vanishing again in hover. Charlie clicked another key and the active camouflage disengaged.

"Good god," muttered Sam.

"How sweet is that!?" exclaimed Charlie, walking to the trailing edge of Paladin's wing to look down on the scene.

"I'm starting to feel obsolete," said Sam, straightening up from his defensive stance. "How long can it manage that?"

"Sustained, maybe ten minutes, and it kills the flight time," said Charlie. "Mystique's got some heavy-duty batteries but active camo's just too power-hungry."

"Mystique?" said Sam, baffled.

"The drone?" said Charlie, as if Sam had asked him why Paladin was called a plane. "Because it can disguise itself? Like--"

"Wait," interrupted Sam. "No, Charlie, I don't...no. Okay. Mystique."

Charlie did something odd with his left hand. Mystique whipped another tight spiral and zoomed up towards him. He held out his left arm as if inviting a bird to perch. Instead of the original headset and haptic glove he now wore a long black gauntlet strapped over his usual flannel that covered his hand and arm halfway up to his shoulder. Sam watched in astonishment as the drone reconfigured itself into a long, flat shape like a huge boomerang, then came to rest on the gauntlet. Magnetic locks clicked as they engaged.

"Can it do anything other than aerobatics?" he asked after a moment.

"It's designed for scouting and tactical engagement," said Charlie. He was busy pressing and folding planes of the drone. Somehow this made it compact itself in ways Sam couldn't figure out. He considered the possibility that the drone existed in more than three dimensions. "Video, audio, thermal, infrasonic, hyperspectral, full suite. It's wasted surveilling a convoy from a distance, but in a fight there's nothing better."

"Weapons?"

"Man, whatever you can fit on it." Charlie slotted the drone at last into some smooth half-egg of grey that began to pulse white. Sam hoped that was just the charger. "I can load her up with anything from taser darts to HEAT charges."

"It can fire _antitank rounds?"_

"Only a few. And they have to be made special," said Charlie offhandedly, as if he were describing a food allergy.

"Ah."

"Lucky for us Kobie's seller had a couple in the case," finished Charlie. He sat near the trailing edge of Paladin's wing, avoiding the flaps lest he earn another lecture from Grim. "Might be a good idea, maybe, if Kostiuk brings a tank."

 _If Kostiuk brings a tank._ "Let's keep that in reserve for the moment," said Sam.

Charlie shrugged. "Sure, whatever. You need a dedicated operator to really get peak performance, but it's got a simpler mode for field operation. It even has a follow function where it'll stick with you and watch your back. Cool, right? It's meant to work with the gauntlet but I patched it through to the OPSAT, easy. Just remember to drop yours in the cradle before you leave so I can update the firmware."

"Thanks a lot, Charlie."

"No problem. It's not like the tri-rotors, though," he warned. "Mystique's got a lot of intense onboard algorithms. Just tell it where to go and it'll figure out the safest way on its own. Plus, like, really seriously don't blow this one up."

"Definitely not," said Sam. He eyed the grey half-egg with mild suspicion. "For now, why don't you load it up with a few 7.62 rounds, flashbangs and smoke," he decided. "We'll use it to lay down fast cover."

"On it," said Charlie. He cradled the drone-egg in both arms and walked back along the wing towards the roof hatch. "Keep her away from EMPs, too," he called out as the thought struck him.

Sam gave a half-hearted wave and dropped his hand the second Charlie was out of sight. Antitank rounds on an invisible drone. He might need a few minutes to think about that.

* * *

Seven hours till the show began. Sam scrolled through the video of the convoy for the thousandth time, marking their formation and line of travel. The fifty trucks spread out in a double column that commandeered two lanes. The jeeps rode herd, three ahead and three behind, with the remaining five spaced regularly through the trucks. Every so often black blurs buzzed up to the jeeps and sped away again. Motorcycles, then. Outriders.

"Kostiuk will almost certainly set up here," said Grim. She painted a white line along a long, wide spine of rock that intersected the highway near the coast. "This area's steppe country, almost all farmland. This ridge is the only patch of cover for miles. With any luck Kostiuk will seize the convoy without much trouble. Sam, Briggs, be ready to tip the balance if necessary, but I doubt it will be. I also doubt Kostiuk will be fielding any sort of aircraft, so our drones should have free range of motion."

"I've got the regular flock prepped for overwatch," picked up Charlie. "Plus, since we know where the action's going to go down, I'm trying out one of the new aerostats. It'll park about eight thousand feet over your position. It'll be just like we've got Paladin out there. Real-time chatter, charging station, battlefield info, whatever, no matter where you are."

"And the new one?"

"Mystique will be docked at the aerostat when you get there," said Charlie. "Call her down on the OPSAT when you go into a fight. Sam, you've got initial control, but you can transfer it wherever."

"Remember, we want Kostiuk to win, at least initially. He needs to be caught on the scene or he'll figure out a way to shift the blame. Kobin will make sure Kostiuk gets out there, but we also have to make sure he doesn't leave when the trap is sprung."

"Kobin's tracker?" asked Sam.

"Went live a few hours ago." Charlie brought up a map of the area around Kostiuk's dacha. A white point winked into existence, then traced a zigzag path south. "Signal's loud and clear. He's on the move, heading towards the action, so it looks like he talked Kostiuk into bringing him along."

"What do we know about Kostiuk's force mix?" asked Briggs.

"Not a whole lot," admitted Grim. "Most of what he's scrambled look like private security assets, so expect trained personnel and military hardware, but that's about all we've got. Satellite pass in another couple of hours so we'll know more then."

"Wish we'd lo-jacked Kobie with a subdermal radio," said Charlie mournfully.

"Something to think about when we get him back," said Sam.

Grim shot him a strange look and for a moment he thought she was going to comment, but when she spoke all she said was, "It may not make a difference, but there's one additional complication. Those CIA archive files finally arrived. I think I know why the Russian mob wants Kobin."

Sam settled back and folded his arms, nodding for her to continue. She drew one hand in a large circle, banishing the ambush site and drawing up the familiar constellation of Russian mobsters and old vendettas. "So, as Charlie mentioned, it's more or less impossible to find Soviet records in digital form," she began. "I put in a request at CIA for any archive data relating to the Morlov case. They didn't have much, but fortunately my contact was kind enough to forward some data from Interpol." The photo of Grigor Morlov returned, balding and angry. Names appeared around it. "The same day Grigor was killed 12 syndicate operatives with reasons to want him dead disappeared. No matter how furious the rest of the family was, they now had twelve separate leads to run down. It's taken nearly twenty years for them to cross eleven names off the list. This is the only one left." One name grew to dominate the screen. "Mykhailo Lashko. No one's picked up a single trace of him since the day Grigor died."

"Who's Lashko?" asked Sam.

"Mid-level operative in Morlov's contraband operations. Mykhailo had an excellent reason to hate Grigor - namely, that Grigor personally ordered the death of his father, Petro Lashko." A new photo appeared, this one of a tall, heavyset man with dark slicked-back hair examining an aircraft propeller. "This is just about all there is on Petro, really. He was a small-time criminal on the Black Sea coast, unremarkable, except that one day he walks into the office of the local Morlov boss and shoots him in the head. The Morlovs put out a bounty on him."

"So Petro kills a Morlov man. Grigor Morlov has him killed. Then Petro's son kills Grigor, so Grigor's sons are after him," summarized Charlie. "Wow. Yeah. This is totally going to end well."

"It took Mykhailo six years to set it up, but in '95 he shoots Morlov, frames the others, runs off with eight million dollars, and is never heard from again. No kids, no family, no trace."

"Dead?" asked Briggs.

"By now, who knows? But given his near-total disappearance from all public records at the time, it's likely he was sheep-dipped right after the murder. New identity, new everything."

"Probably living on some Caribbean island with sandy beaches and no extradition treaties," muttered Charlie.

"So the Morlovs want Lashko. And they think Kobin knows where he is," concluded Sam.

"Kobin likely did the sheep-dip," said Grim. "Lashko would have needed a contact with serious resources. Nobody hates the Russian mob like the Ukrainian mob, and vice-versa. Kobin would probably have helped him for free just to stick it to the Russians."

"Well, probably not for _free,"_ said Briggs.

"If Kostiuk already gave Kobin's name to the Morlovs, then he's no longer the only threat in the equation," Grim said to Sam. "The Morlovs are old _vory_ , remember? By _vor_ law, killing Lashko isn't just a personal vendetta, it's a matter of justice. And if Kobin's an accessory, he gets the same punishment. They won't let him walk away without a fight."

"Then again, if Kostiuk was bluffing the Morlovs, they'll take him out for us," Briggs pointed out.

"We've got a dozen questions that only Kobin knows the answers to," declared Sam. "And we don't have a way to get ahold of him before the ambush. We stick with the original plan."

* * *

Three hours out from departure. Sam retired to his cabin to take his usual pre-mission nap. Two hours would leave him fresh and cleared out for the mission. It felt, when he went down for the break, like resetting himself. When he went to sleep he was Sam Fisher; when he woke up he was the splinter cell. He took out a state of mind like a thick jacket - he imagined it, sometimes, as a heavy black leather jacket, padded and armored like motorcycle gear - shrugged it around his shoulders and went out into the world. And when the silence and the violence ended he took it off again, put it on the hanger, put it away. Went to sleep and woke up a human being again.

But now rest eluded him. Thoughts spun in endless loops that imprisoned his attention until he could solve the mystery of their cause. Grim's words echoed inside his skull. _It's not black and white anymore._ The memory of Kostiuk's compound kept intruding. Finding Kobin. He replayed in his mind the unexpected comfort of the man's weight in his arms. Feeling a second heartbeat against his own. The tension of holding Kobin's usual manic force in stillness, like a butterfly trapped in the cage of his fingers. The sight of that round scar on his skin. That image wouldn't leave him, that puckered disk of scar tissue flat against the muscle of his shoulder, interrupting the grey-shaded snake. It plucked some weird heated chord in his gut, in his groin. He wanted to touch it. He wanted to find out how many scars Kobin had, where and when and why, he wanted to touch them all, he wanted, he _wanted..._

He needed to relax. A hand slipped down to his elastic waistband. One more perk of the commander's cabin: thicker walls.

* * *

He ate his pre-mission meal in the small mess in one of its rare empty moments. Gabrielova's pots and pans rattled on the other side of the serving window and mixed with her tuneless hum. He chewed his way methodically through the tray, quietly aligning all the aspects of his mind.

"You are going to fetch the crazy Ukrainian, yes?"

Sam looked up. Gabrielova had paused in her work and leaned over the sill of the serving window, resting on her elbows. He swallowed his mouthful of rice before replying. "That's the idea."

Gabrielova shook her head. "Foolish western boy." It had taken Sam a few confused weeks to figure out that the Vladivostok-born Gabrielova considered "westerners" to be everyone living on the wrong side of the Urals. "You bring him back in one piece."

"Yes," said Sam.

Dishes to Gabrielova, who slotted them into the industrial dishwasher without a pause. Pills, water. Laying out his arsenal piece by piece. The opsuit's fitted black embrace. Arming himself, armoring himself. Stepping into the helo's waiting grasp.

The rotor wash carved a bright circle in the fields of wheat as Maers lifted away to wait at the extraction point. The sun slanted towards the western horizon and lit up the tall waving grass in shades of green and gold. In the distant past some errant fracture in the continual battle between the Eurasian and African plates had thrust a fold of seabed up through the verdant steppes. The solid grey bulk of the rock breached the fields of wheat like a rising whale. From ground level it sloped gently upwards and met the road at a shallow angle about three-quarters along its length, then continued on the other side to drop in a sheer escarpment a hundred feet down to the fields below, The highway had, with typical Soviet efficiency, cut straight through the rock rather than winding around. Workers had blasted a long ragged canyon through it, its edges still sharp and fresh. They perched on its rim. The long ribbon of asphalt ran between the high walls for a full half-mile.

"Perfect bottleneck," commented Briggs at his side.

Sam tipped his head back and stared up into the hot and cloudless blue. The wheat fields looked empty, but a chorus of birdsong and insect chirps rose up from the shadows of their roots. Somewhere high above him the aerostat drowsed under its mylar balloon. Mystique rested in one of its bays in a collection of folded white angles. Somewhere up that road a long convoy flowed down like the first spill of water in a dry creek bed. Somewhere out in the fields behind him Leonid Kostiuk was marshaling the forces at his command. And trailing behind him was Andriy Kobin, exhausted and nervous and afraid, trusting them to pull off their end of the plan.

Charlie's voice chimed in his ear. _"The party hits town in about half an hour. Get yourselves under cover."_

"Convoy?" murmured Sam.

_"Three hours out."_

"Time to pick our positions." Sam stood. "Briggs. Where's Kostiuk going to set up?"

Briggs stood as well and surveyed the canyon. "Drop a roadblock, of course. But not till the very end, gotta get the whole train inside the canyon. Convoy's got outriders, but snipers on these walls should clear them out fast enough. Box them in, pick off the drivers, get his own people inside the trucks. They could be in and out again in half an hour."

"Up to us to keep that from happening. Counter-sniper positions?"

"Drone," answered Briggs immediately. "On those cliffs the snipers will be invisible from the ground but completely exposed from the air. But the drone tips our hand right away. No way Kostiuk doesn't know he's under counterattack. Might bug out before we can trap him."

"No chance of staking out the cliffs and waiting for them to come to us," mused Sam. "They'll be crawling all over it to establish their own positions. But someone could get up there after the fact."

"You're talking climbing an exposed ridgeline in front of a hostile force. Then sneaking up on what could be a dozen snipers and taking them out one by one."

"Don't forget that they can shoot across as well as down. We'll have to do it simultaneously on both sides or they'll clean us off."

"Hey, well, when you put it like that."

"EMP pulse will disable all the vehicles. That's our first salvo. Cut off their means of escape, keep the convoy from getting out as well."

"That still leaves Kostiuk. We can't guarantee he won't bolt. If he's smart he won't be on scene at all."

"Kobin's at least talked him into coming down here. If he doesn't supervise the ambush in person we'll have to draw him out." Sam thought for a moment. "But I don't think he'll do the logical thing. There's ego mixed up in this, that's how Kobin baited him in the first place. He'll need to see this go down in person. And he feels safe here."

"As well he should. He owns this country."

"Not for long," said Sam.

They set up the camo-thermal netting out in the golden fields. Charlie did a sweep with the drone and pronounced them well-hidden. Sam stared up at the reflecting mylar underside of the canopy and mapped the ridgeline in his mind. He closed his eyes to draw the lines of the rock and the canyon, noting sightlines and points of cover. Vic's karambit rested against the inside of his right arm in a hard cold curve. He had sharpened the steel talon on the way in, testing the edge till he was certain it could open a throat before the target had time to struggle. When he opened his eyes a greyscale projection painted the roof of the shelter. He looked over. Briggs had propped up his OPSAT next to him and set it project an image upwards. The pattern of fuzzy white light moved and Sam's brain finally made sense of it: the video feed from the aerostat hovering over their position. The only motion came from the occasional gust of wind that rippled through the tall grass.

"Which side do you want?" he asked Briggs.

"Dunno. Up to a climb, old man?"

"Depends. How do you feel about a hundred meters of bare rock between you and your targets, junior?"

Briggs grinned. "Got some energy to burn off, I suppose. I'll take the rifle up the cliff, move out early, find a place to hang out partway up till we get the go."

"We can use the aerostat as a spotter," said Sam. The grey mosaic of grass and rock and road shifted along the shiny foil. He toggled his own OPSAT and cycled feeds until he found the pulsing white dot of Kobin's tracker. It crept steadily southwest towards their position.

"Almost here," said Sam. "Showtime."

* * *

Leonid Kostiuk was lousy company.

Being trapped in a car with the man for the better part of the day was just about a hundred and eighty degrees from Andriy Kobin's idea of fun. The fatigue that layered a suffocating varnish over everything didn't help, although riding with Kostiuk at least meant air conditioning and water in the July heat. Even so the Range Rover's alleged suspension had made him nauseous about fifteen minutes in and now he concentrated mostly on not throwing up. Not that Leonid didn't deserve it, if he did.

And all Kostiuk insisted on talking about along the way was himself, of course, acting all buddy-buddy now for some reason. Like he gave a shit about Kobin's life. He kept going on about how much things had changed since Kobin had "run off to Malta," and how great it was being finance minister, and blah blah what the fuck ever, six months ago he'd have taken careful notes on exactly how to destroy Kostiuk with this information later but at the moment he just wanted to get there and get this over with. Then he could go back to his bunk and have a shower and sleep for like a year, and when he woke up Paladin would be in the air where nothing could touch him and he could leave this whole fucking mess behind him. Where it belonged.

An 18-wheeler loaded up with fuel barrels and heavy sandbags took the lead in the convoy, followed by a pair of jeeps and the Range Rover. A long trail of APCs (new, Russian make, almost certainly diverted off the factory floor) rolled out along the road behind them, menacing in their armored bulk, although the 50-cals mounted on their roofs were the heaviest armament he'd yet spotted. Even those were likely overkill; if all went according to plan Kostiuk's people would never come close to danger. The gauntlet of snipers would kill the drivers, hole the engine of any vehicle that attempted to flee, and pick off the rest of the CIA agents one by one. Then Kostiuk's people would take possession and drive the convoy to the next intersection, where they would turn north and detour into, he gathered, an aircraft hangar Kostiuk owned in a nearby town.

Kobin stifled another yawn and glanced out the window, wondering where Fisher was. Leonid was talking about the Crimea, for some reason, how nice it was to vacation there. Maybe Fisher was already hiding out there in the fields. Or he'd choked out some poor Russian private and stolen his truck and drove in the convoy right now, heading towards the convergence of their respective forces. Or he and Briggs would jump out of a plane, who knew what Grim had cooked up this time. He just hoped it involved Fisher beating seven kinds of shit out of Leonid.

Odds were good, too. Fisher hadn't sounded pleased about the whole affair even through the mask of psycho robot mission mode. In fact, he'd seemed... Kobin pulled one shoulder of his collared shirt tighter around him. In the morning none of it had seemed real. The idea that Fisher had crept in to the dacha, into his cell, had held him close in the cold night...none of it made any sense in the light of day. None of it could have happened in reality. It had transpired in some other place, some other time, where there were only the shadows and the dull grey skyglow and the warmth of the embrace.

He could get you anything you wanted. He had always been shit at getting what he wanted.

"Nervous, Dyusha?" asked Leonid, breaking through his reverie. Kobin plastered on a smile and turned back to him.

"Not a fan of being around when the shooting starts," he said airily.

Leonid smirked. "That was always your problem, Dyusha. Impulsive as ever, yet you never took the calculated risks." _Fuck you, asshole._ "That's why you never made it to the legal side."

"Seems pretty boring to me. Working in an office, wearing a suit and all that shit."

"Please." Leonid's smirk grew wider. "I own this oblast and five others. You play by your CIA masters' rules. Here, I am the one who makes them."

"How nice for you," mumbled Kobin, pouring sullen envy into his voice, and turned back to the window. Let Leonid get his kicks feeling superior. Whatever it took to walk him into the ambush.

Leonid, over the past two days, had turned out to be amused by the idea that Kobin now worked for a single employer rather than his usual freelance profile of clients. He'd been especially entertained by Kobin's more staid appearance and by his general refusal to get more than buzzed despite the alcohol on offer nearly the entire time (bad idea, _bad idea,_ he would almost certainly lose what little control over his temper he retained). These, to him, were signs that Kobin's stubbornness had finally been broken and the man himself tamed. For his part Kobin had never thought Kostiuk harbored _that_ much resentment towards him. He'd always played the man fair, hadn't he, kept his word and cut him in for his proper share?

But the shape of Leonid's sideways insults belied the wound beneath, and reading them he built up a new image: of a man who had quietly and carefully laid the foundations of a criminal empire while his ostentatious peers gloried in their fortunes and lived like kings, of a man who believed his restraint and discipline made him superior to his colleagues. That it would pay off in victory over people like Kobin in the end. Well, fuck him, then. Kostiuk was boring as shit. He thought his pride made him better? What was the point of pride if it got you killed?

It did surprise him, though, how little Leonid's barbs bothered him. Walking into the CIA's office in Libya had been one of the most difficult things he'd ever done; he began the day master of his domain and ended it little more than an asset to be squabbled over, as Fourth Echelon had driven home when Fisher decided he didn't like to _share._ When the adrenaline jolt of the Blacklist attacks wore off - when it became clear that Fisher had actually meant it about keeping him - the first month aboard Paladin had ground him down into utter misery. After a couple of weeks he'd swiped enough pills from the infirmary to do something about it, and at times he took them out and counted them just to make himself feel better. At least he had this one last sliver of control, this one remnant of autonomy: if he wanted to, he could die. They hadn't managed to take that away.

But then they'd let him out and, over days and weeks and months, ceased to limit him; and he had responded by adapting, bit by bit, to this new life, and now to his astonishment he realized he didn't miss the old one. All at once it unnerved him how far he had settled into Fourth Echelon's routine. He wasn't a prisoner. He wasn't a soldier. He wasn't an operative. What the hell was he doing here?

The core of his life hadn't changed, he told himself. Here he was (alive, healthy, intact, if exhausted) and he was doing what he was good at: bargaining and stealing and screwing over people who thought they could control him. Still, though. _This is my normal, now._ When he plotted out the arc of his future it glowed in cool shades of white and green; it looked like the wide sleek spread of Paladin's wings.

That image cheered him up a bit, and so he indulged, imagining himself back in the left seat with clear skies and a tailwind and the ocean unrolling thirty thousand feet below. A little smile came to him unbidden. _What a great plane._

Thus fortified he choked down another wave of nausea - _can't lose the tracker, stomach, no throwing up_ \- and returned to Leonid in time to nod and laugh over yet another story of "the old days." Leonid had a nine-millimeter strapped to his side. He had noted that immediately (and noted, as well, that it was a shit model that Leonid had almost certainly paid too much for) but now it snapped again to the forefront of his attention. Leonid had a gun and Kobin was about to lead him into a trap. _I'll deal with him,_ Fisher had told him and at the time it had been plenty reassuring. But now that the moment approached - and as he turned his head he could see already the grey line of the rock outcropping along the horizon - he found himself wishing he'd gotten Fisher to be a lot more specific.

He sat back and felt the black square of Charlie's killer credit card pressing in his back pocket. A sliver of control, a remnant of autonomy. One hand tapped briefly at a spot at the base of his sternum, pressing through the stiff embroidery to the skin beneath. The garish bullet tattoo under his fingers covered up the older, uglier scar where someone had gotten off a lucky shot. Not lucky enough in the end, he reminded himself. He had won then, and he would win now. One way or another Leonid was going to find out exactly how pissed off he was.

Leonid's tac team coordinator (a stone-faced Japanese man with the unlikely and wonderful name of Petunia Shizuki, now that was a story he wanted to hear) called another status check on the radio. Leonid had at least been smart enough not to use actual official Ukrainian government assets to do this, although mobilizing a mercenary group all but advertised as being on his long-term payroll wasn't much better. Once the vehicles had finished sounding off Petunia issued a short burst of orders. The 18-wheeler in front of them pulled ahead, leaving the caravan, and the jeeps and carriers swung off the road together to drive into the fields of wheat. Tires ground the golden stalks into the earth in a hail of snapping and crashing. Kobin groaned internally at the size of the trail they were leaving. Didn't Leonid know anything about stealth?

Another burst of static over the radios and the APCs peeled off behind them into a long arc. Leonid's Range Rover ground to a halt near the place where the rock pierced the soil like a compound fracture. The APCs continued along its base in a hail of broken wheat and diesel fumes. Leonid's driver (sidearm chambered for .357 rounds, stun baton and at least two knives, really not to be fucked with) stopped the car and got out to open his door.

"Showtime," said Leonid, donning dark sunglasses and grinning. Kobin managed a stretched smile in reply and followed him out into the sunlight. Fresh air, thank god. He breathed in deep and let the dry heat of the steppes burn his throat.

"So far so good," said Leonid, surveying first the wheat, then the rock. "Let's take a look at this ambush site of yours, though, shall we?"

Kobin shook his head in mock offense. "I keep telling you, man, it's solid." He accepted a bottle of water from the silent driver and tried not to drink it all at once. "Fish in a fucking barrel. Long as you keep CIA from catching wise."

"Hm. Well." Leonid began to walk up the shallow slope of the outcropping, finding easy purchase on the rough and lichen-coated stone. Kobin stifled a groan and began to follow him, breathing hard in the July heat. He imagined the little silver capsule in his guts beeping its signal to the SMI as he climbed. _Come and get this douchebag, guys, I'm either gonna punch him or have a heart attack._

The air cooled as he climbed, the ridge catching the breeze. Its heights commanded the terrain for miles around. He spared a brief moment of gratitude to Grim for finding such a perfect site. Halfway up the grey shoulder of rock Kobin paused to catch his breath and scanned the horizon with the vague, irrational hope that he could spot some sign of Fourth Echelon's presence, but nothing revealed itself. When he looked down the highway he saw the 18-wheeler pulled over onto the shoulder about a mile away as if the driver had stopped for a rest. The column of APCs curled around the end of the canyon and into the cover of the escarpment on the far side. The first transports had already parked and disgorged their cargo of Petunia's mercs in plain battle dress, black sticks of weaponry across their backs (varied loadout, fifty caliber antimateriél rifles mixed with antipersonnel pieces, bargain-bin AKs for cleanup). Their numbers seemed, at once, to be endless, and Kobin's stomach clenched for reasons that had nothing to do with motion sickness.

He looked out again towards the golden fields. Two fingers tapped again at the old scar beneath his sternum.

_Fisher, I sure hope you're out there._

_Come and save me one more time._

* * *

 _"Kostiuk's here,"_ announced Charlie. Sam had heard the incredible racket of the armor column some five minutes ago and so he only murmured, "Copy that."

 _"He's in the Range Rover,"_ Charlie continued. _"I read at least three thermal signatures in there."_

Sam stared out through the slit in his camo shroud. A crunch of tires, spray of dirt, and a bright red Range Rover pulled to a halt about twenty meters below the hollow in the ridge where he lay concealed. Doors slammed. The sound came to him a fraction of a second out of sync. A driver slash bodyguard opened the rear door and Leonid emerged wearing sunglasses and a smug grin. The man kept holding the door and a moment later a familiar figure staggered out as well.

"I've got eyes on Kobin," reported Sam. He toggled the zoom functions on the goggles. "Doesn't look injured."

 _"Copy that, getting his signal loud and clear,"_ said Grim. _"Kostiuk still on the hook?"_

"From what I can tell. But he's keeping Kobin close to hand. His reputation precedes him."

_"That could be a problem. We spring the trap, he might just turn around and shoot Kobin before we can get to him."_

"He's armed," said Sam. "He's going to have to take care of himself for this one."

 _"They're deploying,"_ reported Briggs from his ledge. He had climbed about three-quarters up the cliff face and wedged himself into a neat little alcove. A sheet of camo netting made his perch just another blank patch of stone. Kostiuk's little caravan had parked beneath him without, it seemed, noticing him at all.

 _"Looks like seven APCs, Russian make,"_ he relayed quietly. _"I count 41 hostile personnel, armed, long guns."_

 _"Confirmed, 41 hostiles, tallies with what we're seeing,"_ reported Grim. _"Sam, there's another 10 on your side, plus Kobin, Kostiuk, and the bodyguard."_

 _"I can hole the engines from here once the shooting starts, keep them from getting away,"_ offered Briggs. 

 _"No need,"_ interrupted Charlie before anyone else could say anything. _"The EMP's gonna brick them solid."_

"Briggs, you take control of the tri-rotor with the EMP package," ordered Sam. "Deploy at will."

_"Copy."_

Sam rolled away from the camo slit and settled back into the small hollow. He could have tapped any number of aerial feeds to watch Kostiuk's snipers arrange themselves along the canyon rim, but he found a certain purity in using only his own senses. It tapped into something primal, the hunting dynamic that evolution had shaped his body to win. So he lay with his chest pressed to the ground, listening for distant sounds, feeling for vibration in the stone. He rested in the dark, enveloped in the motion all around him, secure in his concealment.

* * *

The Range Rover had been moved to the shadow of the escarpment, Leonid having reluctantly acknowledged the need for concealment until the trap was sprung. Kobin sat nearby on the hood of one of the jeeps, swinging a leg and eavesdropping on one of the mercs' radio. Every time he heard a burst of chatter his heard skipped a beat as he waited to hear news of a captured American operative.

But none came. Leonid was deep in conversation with Petunia and so he was left to his own devices. He passed the time counting snipers - ten on each side of the canyon - and ground teams - three, one on each end of the canyon and one in reserve. Then he catalogued the different armaments the convoy carried, since hey, maybe that would be useful later. Then he climbed up atop an APC and poked around the 50-cal machine gun on its swivel mount till one of the vehicle's crew noticed and barked at him, then, finally, stretched out in the back seat of a Jeep with the door open, flopped down in utter lethargy. Hurry up and wait, war is periods of tedium, yeah yeah whatever, but usually he was the one instigating things and in any case knowing that didn't make this part any less _boring_.

* * *

The radio's trill broke the still trance of his awareness. Sam recollected himself.

 _"Convoy's inbound,"_ reported Charlie. _"Fifteen minutes to impact."_

* * *

Kobin knew something was up when one of the men ejected him from the jeep in loud and rather rude Russian. Kobin scrambled out and flipped the man the bird over his shoulder as he half-walked, half-ran back to the bright red Range Rover, which was already idling.

"Go time?" he said as he slid into the backseat. Leonid was already sitting and addressing someone on his radio. He lowered it for a moment to order the driver to move out, then returned to his conversation, ignoring Kobin completely. Well, fine, be an asshole. The silent driver shifted gears and the Range Rover rattled and bumped its way out of the shelter of the escarpment. They rolled out to a spot about a hundred meters from the road and fifty from the end of the canyon, where Leonid issued a curt order to stay.

 _"Five minutes out,"_ crackled the radio.

"What's happening?" asked Kobin. Leonid hissed at him to be quiet. Kobin narrowed his eyes, then pushed open his door and stepped out. The roar of car engines echoed down the canyon. An answering sound came from behind him. Kobin turned and shaded his eyes and saw, far down the highway in the other direction, the semi-truck pulling onto the highway. Then he ducked back inside the Range Rover and slammed his door shut and clapped his hands over his ears, because he knew what was going to happen next.

_"Target is in position. Alpha team, ready."_

By the time the convoy spotted the truck it was moving at a steady clip straight towards them on the correct side of the road, to all appearances a civilian 18-wheeler going about its business. The lead vehicles in the convoy's double-wide column hesitated when they saw it driving merrily towards them.

_"Alpha team, go."_

Just before the rock walls rose up the driver swerved the wheel hard, sending up a mighty screech of tires and a cloud of burnt rubber and dust. The truck slewed sideways and the driver dove from the cab as it jackknifed clean through ninety degrees and smashed flat against the rock in a rending crunch of metal. The convoy's lead vehicles tried to turn the instant the semi did as well, but the drivers' instincts led them awry in the tight canyon; two jeeps spun out of control and smashed into the walls, two more rammed straight into the oncoming truck. The transports behind them peeled off frantically in every direction as they tried to brake and swerve around the rapidly-growing wreckage. Kobin spared a wince for the delicate instruments packed within. A lot of those centrifuges, he guessed, were going to need recalibrating. The giant tangle of steel that had been the truck ground to a halt in a hail of echoes wedged firmly across the canyon's breadth. One of the jeeps sparked and the fuel barrels inside the truck lit with a whoomph and a plume of flame.

 _"Beta team, ready,"_ said the radio.

* * *

 _"Guess we can consider that road blocked,"_ deadpanned Charlie. The flaming truck whited out a long bar on the aerostat's video feed.

"Stand by," said Sam. "Let's see if Kostiuk can land this one on his own."

* * *

 _"Beta team, go,"_ ordered Petunia with utter calm.

Tires screeched as APCs squealed out of cover and barricaded the other end of the canyon. Their machine guns swiveled to shoot straight down the convoy's length. Sniper fire opened up all along the canyon rim before the echoes of the crash had died away. The long, thunderous cracks of antimateriél rifles lanced down into the convoy's vehicles while the pepper-rattle of machine gun fire strafed troops trying to escape their trucks. Kobin couldn't stand just listening anymore; he opened the door again and ran to the edge of the road, trying to see anything past the flaming wreckage.

Then a white streak arced upwards from the canyon's floor and a second later an explosion burst from the rim, throwing dust and rock high into the air.

"Ah, shit," muttered Kobin. _Guess they stole more than centrifuges._

Leonid had walked out behind him and surveyed the canyon himself. "They have grenade launchers," he said in an even, menacing tone. He turned and stared straight at Kobin. "They have _grenade launchers."_

"Dude, I did not sell them those!" protested Kobin. "You can't - expect CIA to go into hostile territory without some heavy guns!"

The sounds of heavy explosives faded away. _"Target down,"_ came over the radio. " _Securing remaining hostiles."_

Kobin had a feeling "securing" did not mean bagging them with zip ties and handcuffs.

 _"Gamma team, move in,"_ called Petunia.

* * *

The familiar ripple fire of AK-47s rose up through the stone. The steady sound gradually died away into bursts, then the occasional crackle.

 _"Red Army guys are down,"_ reported Grim at last. _"Kostiuk's getting his own people into the trucks. They're about to move the APCs."_

"Briggs," murmured Sam.

 _"Brace for impact,"_ answered Briggs.

The EMP made virtually no noise itself, but as its invisible pulse washed over the battle the sound of engines flared and died in a chorus of shrieks. Shouts immediately echoed up the canyon as men scrambled to figure out what had happened.

"Time to move," ordered Sam.

He swept the camo netting aside and moved up and over to the cover he had marked before in a single smooth motion. The first part of the crawl, despite its long exposed plain, posed minimal threat. The ridge was empty of targets and the snipers on the rim were utterly focused on the canyon below. An antipersonnel rifle barked once, but most of the gauntlet had gone silent, their work accomplished.

He considered a moment, then decided on left-to-right. The first sniper at the far left of the line had actually positioned himself to shoot straight down the side of the ridgeline, guarding the flank and taking care of anyone who tried to run. Sam waited till the man pulled the trigger on his own rifle and darted across the stone before the deafening report had died away. The karambit flashed. He left the body as it was, finger still on the trigger. The blood pooled hidden beneath it.

"One," he whispered. As he made his way to the next target Briggs' voice answered, _"One."_

Along the line. One by one. Each with their own unique challenge - this one lying in a hollow, this one under camo netting, this one nearly at the edge of the cliff - and every one of them the same. The karambit sliced. Someone died. He moved on.

The sound still bouncing through the canyon compensated for the drop in gunfire for a time, but once Sam reached seven (Briggs, five) it was impossible not to notice the drop in volume. The ground troops below had realized all of the vehicles were dead and were regrouping in tight formations, searching for the enemy.

* * *

Kobin thought he could feel the EMP when it zapped out across the battlefield, like a cold breeze that bypassed the skin. The chill in his blood that followed, though, was entirely due to his own fear. Fourth Echelon had tipped its hand. Now the real fight was coming.

"Then move the cargo to the other ones and get them back on the road!" Kostiuk screamed into the radio.

 _"They're all dead,"_ answered his team leader. _"We've been hit with an EMP."_

Well, as he always told his clients: the best defense was a good offense.

"Leonid, what the _fuck!"_ he yelled, jabbing a finger at him. "How in the name of god did you cock up the goddamn simplest fucking ambush in the history of ever!?"

Leonid recoiled slightly from the unexpected tirade. Kobin cursed and stomped off, then back, as if he couldn't restrain his anger. "You _idiot!_ If CIA finds out I sold you the damn convoy we're _both_ completely - fucking - _fucked!"_

"You didn't--" began Leonid.

"I told you it was goddamn CIA!" Kobin snapped before Leonid get out another word. "You couldn't do the math and come up with 'hey, maybe they've got something nicer than grandma's old assault rifle'!?"

A distant clunk. Leonid's silent driver had run back to the Range Rover and popped its hood. Now he worked elbow-deep in the engine.

"Oh god," said Kobin, as if the weight of the situation were finally hitting him. "Oh god oh god, we gotta get out of here, man. We're all gonna die, we're all gonna--"

"Shut up!" barked Leonid frantically. "Just shut up and let me think! Fuck the CIA. I'll figure something out!"

Kobin stalked off again, muttering to himself, while Leonid shouted over the radio for someone, anyone, to get the trucks moving again. _Whatever you do, don't throw me into that briar patch..._ he thought, and hid his smile.

* * *

Ten bodies lying all in a line. Neat handiwork, all. Sam wiped the karambit's blade clean and closed it again.

"This side's taken care of," he radioed.

_"Copy that. Briggs?"_

A moment of silence. _Then, "It's done."_

_"Copy. Okay, gentlemen, get yourselves in order for phase 3."_

Sam began the descent to ground level, not bothering much with cover. Even the perimeter sentries had been pulled away to deal with the vehicle crisis. He caught a flash of motion on the other rim and watched through the aerostat as Briggs settled in with his own weapon plus a nice pair of rifles "borrowed" from his targets.

 _"Overwatch is go,"_ radioed Briggs.

"Copy," said Sam. "Grim, how long?"

 _"You should be able to hear them now."_  

And indeed the sound of helicopter blades was rising.

* * *

Voices jabbered over the radio in the pidgin argot the mercs used among themselves. Kobin kept up his pacing and muttering, hands jammed into his pocket. He didn't have to fake the worried expression. His skin tingled all over, waiting for a bullet. For a second he was ashamed at his own fear before his brain retorted _sorry I'm a normal person with a normal healthy dislike of high-velocity lead._

The sound of an engine startled him out of his reverie. Far off the side of the road Leonid's driver slammed the hood of the Range Rover, now purring in idle. _Fuck. What the fuck._ Oh god. How had the little bastard gotten the damn thing running again, now Leonid could bolt--

 _"Alert,"_ cut in Petunia. The other voices went silent. Kobin stalked theatrically back within earshot.

 _"At least ten,"_ someone was confirming over the radio.

 _"Eyes on,"_ said another voice suddenly. _"They're Ukrainian Army."_

Kobin's stomach contracted. His blood went cold. Now they'd stuck their dick in it good and proper. Now he had no choice but to act.

Now or never.

All of this flashed through his head in the fraction of a second it took Leonid's face to go slack, then contort into slow realization. He turned his head, very slowly, to look directly at Kobin.

Who was holding out a flat black rectangle with one clipped corner. 

 _"Сука,"_ Leonid managed to spit in one violent hiss before Kobin nailed him in the chest with the copper dart.

"Surprise, jackass," Kobin told the convulsing form. He kicked him in the ribs once for good measure, which was why the bullet only grazed his right shoulder.

Instinct seized his body and had him running into the tall wheat before his ears even processed the gun's report. He ran frantically, crushing and scraping through the stiff stalks. He spared a glance over his shoulder and saw a silent, purposeful figure following his trail. _Oh fuck._ Leonid's fucking driver, _oh shit, oh fuck,_ he had forgotten all about him, he hadn't realized he was watching, oh _fuck._

* * *

 _"Kostiuk's down,"_ reported Grim suddenly, when Sam was halfway back down the ridge. _"I think Kobin shot him. Kostiuk's bodyguard is going after him."_

 _He'll have to take care of himself for this one._ Like fuck. "Charlie," snapped Sam at once.

 _"Already on it."_  

* * *

Kobin zigzagged whenever he remembered to, which was about every time he heard the driver's sidearm go off. He didn't know why he hadn't been shot yet and did not at the moment have the energy to consider it. All his breath and blood went into running and dodging and trying not to seize up and die. _Okay...maybe...more time...in the gym._

Then he burst out into sudden, gut-wrenchingly open ground. The grey rock spine rose up before him and he could have cried. How the fuck hadn't he seen it coming? How the fuck had he-- and then Leonid's driver stepped out of the wheat field, in no hurry, cocking the hammer of his gun.

Kobin backed up slowly till one heel banged against the rock. He held up both hands and tried a smile.

"Hey, so. I can explain," he began.

Then the air thumped and smoke burst around them. Kobin doubled over, coughing. That instinct of memory, that blood remembrance, snapped him to another time and place. Where he had been captive, back against the wall, and smoke had burst--

Fisher. He ran. His eyes watered but he dragged a hand along the rock and followed it as best he could. His foot caught the edge of the road's surface and he pitched forward and caught himself on his wrists. Pain scorched his palms and spiked up through his arms. The smoke began to shred away on the light breeze. Far on the other side the red Range Rover blared like a siren in the cloud. He pushed himself up and ran towards it with a last burst of strength. He put a hand on the door handle and a shot went past his head and shattered the window in front of him.

He threw up his arms and dropped to the ground fast enough to avoid the glass. The impact winded him and he rolled into a sitting position, back against the SUV, heaving for breath. And Leonid's bodyguard emerged from the smoke, still holding the damn pistol, still moving at that steady pace.

Kobin's survival instincts considered the idea of begging, decided it wouldn't work. Instead he only sighed in what he realized was mild annoyance and said, "Oh, for fuck's sake."

The driver smirked. It was the first expression Kobin had seen him make.

Then a shimmer sliced through the air and the driver, baffled, raised a hand to the red hole in his throat before he toppled over sideways.

Kobin froze, absolutely still, holding his breath.

When nothing happened for a moment he pushed himself upright, bracing himself against the Range Rover. Glass crunched underfoot. Occasional gunfire still rattled in the canyon, returning again to his awareness as he waited. Kostiuk's fallen radio squawked angrily out on the asphalt.

Then the air rippled in front of him and sleek white polygonal planes phased into being.

"Holy _shit,"_ breathed Kobin, and then he burst out laughing, slumping against the side of the car. Blind impulse reached out one hand towards the hovering form of the Mossad drone. _"Totally_ worth it," he squeaked out through the hysterical mirth. The drone floated closer and, when he finally regained some measure of composure, came to a hover just in front of his chest. A magnetic lock clicked and two black objects dropped from beneath it. Kobin looked at it quizzically, then knelt and picked them up. A black and silver headset, a rough-textured glove. The drone followed his motions, then waggled its wings, for all the world like a dog that had brought a leash to its owner and now waited eagerly to go for a walk.

Kobin felt the glove and peered inside. The black fabric had a coarse weave with an odd, pebbly texture. Lines of silver wove through it inside and out. Okay. Weird. He put on the headset, adjusted the earpiece and mic, flipped the little glass HUD down over his right eye. It lit up immediately to place a series of thin white concentric circles over the drone itself, but little more.

"Uh," he said, hoping it had a hot mic. The drone came to attention. "Hello?"

 _"Kobin, status,"_ came Sam's voice suddenly in his ear.

A strange giddiness rose in his chest, like a bright tide washing up through all his muscles. "Hey, it's about time! Where you guys at? This drone is fucking _amazing,_ by the way."

 _"Working,"_ answered Sam shortly. _"Get somewhere out of the line of fire."_

Kobin scanned his immediate surroundings. The gunfire in the canyon had more or less sputtered out, but, Kostiuk or no Kostiuk, Petunia's men were still attempting to revive their stalled vehicles. Someone would probably come looking for Kostiuk when he didn't answer the radio, so he couldn't stay here, and there was no way he was going into the canyon or up on the ridgeline. That left either the cover of the escarpment - which was likely still full of Petunia's men - or the fields.

This time he took it slow as he crept out into the cover of the wheat. He did his best not to leave a trail, but it wasn't like he'd done a lot of wilderness training. Outdoors was not his area of expertise. The drone followed above him with a soft whine. When he had made it a hundred meters off the road he said, "Okay, uh, I think I'm okay."

 _"Stay there. I'm transferring control of the drone to you."_ The HUD lit up with brilliant criss-crossing trails. The concentric circles around the drone bulged and split into dozens of lines, shapes, patterns of light that painted icons across his sight. None of them looked even remotely familiar.

"Sure hope this has voice recognition."

 _"Activation word is set to..."_ Kobin could hear the sigh in Sam's voice. _" 'Mystique'. For now."_

"Like the comic book character?"

 _"See?"_ burst out Charlie. _"It's not that weird!"_

"Okay, Mystique," said Kobin. A chime sounded in his ear. "Thermal vision."

Another tone, this one distinct, and the HUD lit with the blue-yellow-pink of infrared. Kobin scanned his surroundings. Tiny moving patches of animals in the field. Two horizontal blobs. The one on the bright strip of asphalt must be Kostiuk and the other had to be the driver's cooling corpse. The Range Rover, he realized, must still be idling, since heat bloomed in its engine. Somehow he had completely tuned that out.

"Optical," he ordered. Nothing changed. Wait, shit. "Mystique." Chime. "Optical." A third tone and normal vision returned.

 _"The glove's haptic,"_ Charlie said. _"Go ahead and put it on, it'll sync automatically."_ Kobin pulled the faintly metallic fabric over his right hand. All at once it stiffened and he almost yanked it off again. _"It mimics a control stick, force feedback and everything. Now Mystique's pretty sensitive, so maybe take it--"_ The drone shot up a dozen meters in a sudden and violent aileron roll, then whipped back down through a dive loop. Kobin let out an exuberant whoop.

 _"--slow,"_ finished Charlie. _"Okay. Nevermind."_

"Wait. Can it do the invisible thing again?" 

 _"Call for 'cloak.' But not for long. Kills the batteries."_  

"We gotta get some bigger batteries."

 _"Copy_ that."

 _"Sit still and don't get shot for a few more minutes,"_ ordered Sam, but Kobin wasn't listening anymore. He pulled the headset half off his face, removing the earpiece, and looked up at the sky.

"Guys, I hear helicopters," he said in a rush. "Leonid has fucking helicopters."

 _"Relax,"_ said Grim. _"That's just phase 3."_

"What?" 

 _"Shevchenko's men. They're friendlies."_  

"Wait, like, Radomir Shevchenko? General Radomir Shevchenko?"

 _"Let me guess,"_ said Sam. _"You've got a history."_

"Dude has this crazy grudge against me because I made fun of his hat once."

Sam waited.

"Also I maybe stole some tanks," admitted Kobin.

 _"How many tanks."_  

"It might have been a lot of tanks."

Sam sighed. _"Just sit still."_

Kobin returned his attention to the HUD. "Mystique. Um, video. Feed. Ventral camera." The screen switched to the view from the drone's belly. It took him a few seconds to get used to the new orientation, but soon he managed to send it up above the ridgeline.

 _"Kobin,"_ came Fisher's voice in a warning tone.

"I'm sitting still," he retorted. "I'm sitting!"

* * *

The helos couldn't have come in stealthily, and so they didn't even try. Kostiuk's men shouted and reformed long before the first olive-green birds swooped in low enough to let soldiers in tactical gear fast-rope down onto the open road. Sam made it down to the asphalt of the highway just as gunfire opened up along the line of APCs barricading the near end of the canyon.

"Grim, status," radioed Sam.

_"Shevchenko's forces just engaged Kostiuk's group. They're holed up in the canyon. They can't get out but Shevchenko's guys can't get in, either."_

A familiar blast erupted from the canyon, magnified into a tremendous roar by the walls. A white streak arced up over the barricade and blew a helo to shrapnel. For a moment there was silence on the line.

"And they have a rocket launcher," said Sam flatly.

 _"Those Red Army grunts had some sticky fingers,"_ said Kobin.

Another rocket spiraled up and the helos dodged and scattered in trails of glowing flares. The warhead blew itself to pieces inside one of the decoy clouds, but the pilots still wavered, reluctant to move back within range.

_"Sam, if that guy gets off any more shots, he could take out half of Shevchenko's forces."_

_"Hang on,"_ said Kobin, and he sounded strangely gleeful. _"I got an idea."_

And the white curve of the drone soared out over the canyon.

* * *

Mystique's controls were just as sensitive as Charlie had said; keeping level flight took nearly all of Kobin's attention. He righted the drone and steered towards the barricade of stalled vehicles. "Mystique. Cloak," he tried. A trill in his ear and the drone rippled and dissolved into the clear blue sky as it crossed over the canyon. He flicked through feeds as he searched for the fucker with the rocket launcher. On the thermal cam he caught the dissipating heat trail the warhead had left behind and dipped to follow it. Hopefully the Red Army morons had only brought one launcher, or maybe only a few rockets, or done something else stupid that would keep all their asses from getting smoked from half a mile away.

 _"Sam, bad news,"_ said Grim. _"Looks like Kostiuk's back up."_

 _"How?"_ asked Sam at the same time Kobin blurted, "What the fuck!?"

 _"Stungun must have shorted. Didn't discharge right,"_ said Charlie to both of them. _"Look, I said it was a prototype."_

 _"He's got one of the cars running somehow."_ A pause. _"He's making a break for it, Sam, get to that car before he does or we lose him."_

_"Location."_

_"Far end of the canyon."_

_"Moving."_  

"No way man, no fucking way," broke in Kobin. Manic fury twisted his voice into a snarl. "That cockbiting shiteating son of a bitch does not walk away from this. I'll blow his fucking head off first."

"Negative, _Kobin, we need Kostiuk alive,"_ ordered Fisher.

Kobin scowled and nearly snapped into the radio when the thermal feed lit up. "There!" he called as the HUD painted a box around the figure crouching on the hood of a truck with the Stinger launcher over his shoulder.

 _"Got him,"_ said Briggs. _"Sam, got a fix on the rocket launcher. Go for Kostiuk."_ Alright. Fisher was gonna go get Kostiuk. That solved that problem, right? Fisher would find him and punch him right in his smug jerkass face. He zoomed in the feed. Stinger guy was sighting in again. Where the hell was Briggs?

As if that thought had conjured it two very loud, very fast things happened at once: Stinger guy's head jerked to one side and his body began to topple off the truck, and the last rocket left the launcher in a violent spray of white-hot exhaust.

 _"Target down,"_ said Briggs, but the rocket still shot up past the canyon's rim. Kobin slewed the drone over and down on instinct, zigzagging through evasive maneuvers even though his radar hadn't pinged, focused entirely on escaping the airspace. Suddenly static squealed in his headset and just as quickly went dead silent.

"Grim, I just got interference. They might have a jammer." No response. "I've still got control signal, but, uh..." The silence continued. Total silence, he realized, not a single pop or hiss on the line.

"Fisher?" he asked tentatively. "Fisher! Hey! Grim! Anybody copy!?"

Silence.

"...Anyone?"

He was alone. It fell on him all at once, thick and heavy, like the cessation of a sound he hadn't noticed till it was gone. Alone wasn't strange, alone was normal, except now it felt very strange indeed and very, very disconcerting. Gunfire roared in the distance as the army and Petunia's mercs traded rounds. One of them would win and one of them would lose. A white glass wall had dropped between him and the world, like he'd taken some pills, except he hadn't taken any pills and all he could think about was the silence and the alone. One of them would win and one of them would lose and, he understood, he himself would have little to do with the outcome either way. The things he had set in motion the moment he decided to play the long game were now, at last, wholly beyond his control. And if something really had happened, that was, to Fisher and Briggs and maybe even Paladin (nothing could have happened to Paladin, no, not back in Donetsk, but what else did Leonid know, what else did Petunia have in reserve) then it didn't matter what he wanted.

But there was one thing he knew he could do, and one hand clenched into a fist even as he thought of it. He could find Leonid Kostiuk and make him regret the day he ever decided to fuck with Andriy Kobin.

* * *

Sam rounded the base of the ridgeline just as the roar of a Stinger launch drowned the sound of Briggs' rifle. The man's voice reported a cool _"Target down"_ in his ear. Briggs' target must have had his finger on the trigger, though, because one last rocket streaked up above the canyon's rim and curved over, on the scent of the helos' radio transmissions. The birds scattered and dropped flares again, most of them lighter and swifter now that they had offloaded their human cargo. The rocket hit a chaff cloud and came out the other side confused. Sam saw its nose waggling back and forth as it searched for its lost target. Then it cornered abruptly and headed straight up.

"I'm about halfway there," he radioed. "Good work, Briggs, Grim."

 _"What?"_ said Grim. 

"For jamming the..." Sam trailed off as the rocket disappeared into the sky.

 _"Oh shit,"_ sighed Charlie.

High up in the blue something flared. Static burst through the comms and two of his OPSAT's feeds went dark. Sam closed his eyes.

"Charlie, please tell me that wasn't the aerostat," he said. 

 _"It wasn't..._ not _the aerostat."_

Sam bit his tongue and counted till the words he wanted to say retreated to the back of his mind. "Alright. Reconfigure to use Mystique's feeds. Kobin, status."

Silence.

"Kobin, report," he ordered.

But it was Charlie who answered, still sounding subdued. _"Kobin's radio was, uh..."_

"Relayed through the aerostat," finished Sam. "Okay. Charlie, version two, consider chaff."

_"Look, those things are not fast. Or like...movable."_

_"Sam, Kostiuk, now,"_ broke in Grim. _"Because otherwise Kobin's going to get there first."_

He started to run.

* * *

This was great, though. This was perfect. How come he didn't do this more often? Everything came to him with perfect clarity: the heat, the smell of the earth, the sound of small birds, the distant racket of war. The white glass wall in his mind had shattered under a sea of red. He grinned as he ran back towards the highway. It shouldn't feel this _good_ , to be out in a firefight, to be in real danger of getting shot. But it felt more like a mad night out on the town than any sort of combat. It felt like doing coke without the coke. Mystique shot forward past his head and bared again its silver teeth. He was going to find Leonid Kostiuk and put him in the fucking ground and the idea of it made his heart sing. _Fisher's a bad fucking influence,_ one corner of his mind grumbled, but the roar in his blood drowned it out.

* * *

Kostiuk was no longer alone. His mercenaries had noticed his radio silence and now one helped him up while the other stood pointing his shotgun down the road, then into the field, then back towards the SUV pulled off the road. Sam dropped to a swift, silent walk and made his way along the ridge's flank, hiding in its curves and outcroppings. He was close enough to hear Kostiuk shouting angrily into his radio. Heat from the burning truck that still blocked this end of the canyon raised a sweat on his skin under the opsuit.

"I don't see Kobin," he reported. "I'll get Kostiuk before--"

The air shivered and a blurred streak whipped past. Sam had no time to react before smoke burst around Kostiuk's guards in thick black clouds. Sam ducked away and heard the drumbeat detonations of flashbangs. When he looked again one of Kostiuk's guards stumbled out of the cloud, then another; then a bent form that had to be Kostiuk between them. They were running for the rock wall. _Shit_. He retreated as swiftly as he dared; fortunately the men had other things on their mind.

The first one reached the ridge, slung Kostiuk against the rock, and stood in front of him sweeping rapidly with his assault rifle's muzzle. But just as the other crossed the shoulder of the road and passed along the edge of the wheat field, that shimmer whipped through the air again and he crumpled like he'd been punched in the gut. And then Kobin was there, breaking out from cover; he lunged upright as the man fell, snatched his tumbling shotgun out of the air, and fired a blast straight into the rock over Kostiuk's head.

"I suggest you stay the fuck down, Leonid!" he shouted. His voice was nearly unrecognizable through the adrenaline scream. Another flashbang burst at the base of the rock and in the space of the sound Kobin fired both barrels into the chest of the other merc. The man flew back against the ridge in a cloud of meat.

Kostiuk stared at him in utter terror. "Wait - stop--" he tried.

Kobin fired another shot, _bang_ , just at Kostiuk's side. "You _kidnap_ me!" he screamed, advancing on him. _Bang_. White wings phased back into existence high and behind him, pacing his movement. Kostiuk curled into a fetal position pressed against the ridge. "You _threaten_ me!" _Bang_. Chips of grey rock flew through the air. Grass and shell casings crunched beneath his feet. "You try to _sell_ me!" _Bang_. Almost there. _"And now you find out what happens to people who_ fuck _with me!!"_

"You're insane," blurted out Leonid, stupefied.

"No shit, jackass." Kobin pointed the barrel at Leonid's forehead. Put his finger on the trigger. Kostiuk closed his eyes. "Hey Lyonya," said Kobin cheerfully, "want to know the last thing Grigor Morlov ever saw?"

Sam caught Kobin around the midsection. He pivoted in a neat curve and let muscle memory take over - careful not to injure him, no, can't injure him, even though Kobin fought back and what he lacked in skill he made up for in berserker intensity. The black and silver headset flew off and distantly he heard the drone make a sad, confused sound. He twisted the shotgun out of Kobin's grip and tossed it away and the weapon disappeared into the wheat fields. Despite the pain Sam knew he was causing Kobin thrashed and kicked and refused to go down. Finally Sam got him in the gut and the air went out of him in a whoosh and he staggered long enough for Sam to get him pinned properly, hands holding down his wrists and his knee across the man's throat. Sam shoved down once, hard, trying to knock some sense back into him.

Kobin blinked a few times, rapidly, as if he'd just woken up. "Oh, hey Fisher," he said, like they were back in Paladin's mess. "I was wondering where you were."

Sam inhaled sharply. Looking down at Kobin like that - his hair a tousled mess, bright color standing in his cheek, eyes wide and glittering - pinned down, breathing hard, looking up at him with sly aggression - oh boy. He was in trouble. He did _not_ have time for this. Sam shoved himself back upright hastily, desperate to avoid the ultimate embarrassment of getting aroused in a fitted opsuit. The razor adrenaline focus of a hostile situation should have lifted his mind above that kind of distraction, but here and now and with _him_ \-- god, it was only making it _worse._

Kobin got to his knees, planting one hand flat across his chest as he tried to catch his breath.

"You know, once upon at time I got ordered to capture someone I'd rather see dead," said Sam.

"Yeah?" panted Kobin. "What the fuck about it."

"He turned out to be pretty useful," said Sam, looking straight at him.

Kobin looked away. Got his feet under him and pushed himself shakily upright. "Yeah, fine," he mumbled. "Whatever."

"Who are you!?" demanded Kostiuk. Sam started at the sound, having forgotten about him entirely. He fished in pockets for a moment, palmed a sedative dart, and crouched in front of Kostiuk.

"Leonid Kostiuk, you're under arrest by the government of Ukraine and by the United States of America for illegal weapons trafficking, conspiracy to smuggle controlled nuclear equipment, and other charges to be added later," he declared.

Kostiuk gaped at him in utter astonishment. Then his gaze darted sideways to Kobin and he said, "Wait. You really _are_ \--?"

"Surprise," said Kobin, and then Sam stuck the dart in his neck.

* * *

"Not even a little?"

"Not even a little."

"Just like, one punch."

"You got to tase him. Be happy with that."

"Buzzkill."


	8. Sharpen The Saw

_Ukraine Minister Implicated in International Arms Smuggling Deal...IAEA Criticizes Russian Handling Of Crisis...Defense Minister Hailed As Hero After Halting Arms Trade..._ CNN's ticker was utterly useless and the talking heads had been repeating the same four minutes of news for about an hour now. Sam kept watching in some vain hope that someone important might actually chime in, so that was how Grim found him.

"IAEA says they've got all six hundred and ninety-eight centrifuges in custody," she said as Charlie and Briggs drifted to the SMI as well. "The Russian government claims they're investigating the theft."

"Yeah, and a spot of international embarrassment might mean they'll actually do something," said Briggs.

"Any mention of our involvement?" asked Sam.

"As far as General Shevchenko knows, CIA secretly contacted him and offered him a chance to dispose of his rival in return for the centrifuges."

"Yeah, and it was CIA's op as far as the US is concerned, too," interrupted Charlie. "They're taking all our credit."

"Let them," declared Sam. "They'll owe us down the line." Briggs didn't say anything, but he didn't look too broken up either about the prospect of having something to hold over his old colleagues.

"So that's it, then?" asked Charlie. "The day is saved and we all go home?"

"The President hasn't said much, but she also hasn't said anything about an unauthorized op, either. As far as I can tell, we're in the clear," concluded Grim.

Sam caught her afterwards in a corner of the fuselage, as close as he could find to a private meeting space.

"You got everything set up?"

Grim glanced down at the sealed manila envelope in her hands. "Caldwell signed off on it, so everything's in order." He reached for the envelope, but she twitched it away. "Sam, are you sure you want to do this?" Grey eyes bored into his. "Because you can't take it back in a month if you don't like the results."

"I know it's a risk," he said. "It's one I'm willing to take."

She held the envelope out. "You know it's my job to make sure you think these things through," she said as he took it.

"I know."

She favored him then with one of her rare smiles. "But, for what it's worth, I think you're doing the right thing."

Andriy Kobin was in Paladin's cockpit, as he had expected. With the plane stowed in the hangar and no prospect of takeoff any time soon, it was empty, and so Kobin could use it as his quiet spot. Everyone on Paladin needed one, sometimes. Kobin sat on the left seat with his feet propped up on the edge of the right. He was in one of his rare quiet modes, silent, still, and apparently deep in thought. Golden light filtered down through the gaps in the hangar roof and filled the cockpit. In his right hand he held a half-eaten persimmon.

Sam closed the cockpit door behind him. Kobin raised his head slightly, caught sight of him, let it drop. "Hey," he mumbled.

Rather than shift him from the chairs Sam leaned against the crew storage locker on one side of the cockpit. "Good work with Kostiuk," he said.

"Yeah, thanks," said Kobin. He sounded anything but happy about it. "From now on I think I'll leave the ground work to you, Fisher."

"You weren't half bad," said Sam. "No. Really," he added when Kobin gave him a skeptical look.

"I really was going to shoot him."

Sam shrugged. "Everyone loses their temper sometimes."

Kobin stared at him for a moment, then laughed and took another bite of the persimmon. "You just come here to tell me I did good?" he said through a mouthful of fruit. He swallowed and added, "I mean, I hope you did, I hope, like, France isn't on fire and we gotta go right now."

"Brought you some stuff," said Sam, flipping the manila envelope in his hands.

"Yeah?" said Kobin, perking up a bit. "What is it?"

"First," said Sam, placing the envelope at his side, out of Kobin's reach. "I need the answers to three questions."

"Oh...kay?" said Kobin. "Not too sure where this is going. Or what you've got left to ask me about. But hey, why not."

Sam folded his arms. Some things you didn't want to do, well. Sometimes what you wanted didn't mean shit. "When did you start working for Third Echelon?"

Kobin looked baffled. "Ahhh, you coulda just asked about that, Fisher, no need for the theatrics. God, let me think. I took the first contract in..." Kobin closed his eyes, spooling through that eerily comprehensive memory he had for business dealings. "2005. Referral from a buddy. They liked the work I did, came back for more."

2005\. Only two years after Third Echelon had been founded. Kobin was right. He had worked for Third Echelon nearly as long as Sam.

"Lambert inherited me," continued Kobin, echoing Sam's thoughts. "So did Reed."

"What did you do?"

"Is that one of the questions?" said Kobin, half-joking.

"Call it a followup."

"Sure, fine. A lot of dump jobs. Find a body, rig an accident, you know the drill. A lot of those high-value targets you guys took off the streets, they had people who would ask questions if they disappeared, so I'd stage a death to cover it. Ran some guns, not a whole lot, the US is pretty good about keeping its people stocked. Moved a few things across certain borders, got agents in and out, like I did for Kestrel and Archer. Coordinating informants in places I had good networks." He smiled a little at an apparently pleasant memory. "You guys were kind of a platinum customer, really. Paid great for easy work. Mostly so I'd keep quiet, of course. That what you wanted to know?"

Sam nodded and said nothing, folding that knowledge inwards. Slotting it into place. 

_What he wanted to know?_ No. Far from it. But that was what Kobin did, wasn't it? Told you what you _wanted_ to know.

"Second question," he said.

"Shoot," said Kobin lazily.

"You never helped Mykhailo Lashko, did you."

Anyone else might have missed it, the way Kobin stiffened all along his length for a fraction of a second. When he relaxed again, though, something else had come into his body; some languid tension like a basking snake. He tilted his head to look up at Sam, golden sunlight falling through the windows and tangling in his hair.

"That's not a question," he said. His lips quirked for a moment in a half-smile that showed a flash of white teeth.

Sam didn't look away. "You are Lashko."

Kobin said nothing. But he grinned, wider and wider, showing again that flash of teeth, and put a silent finger to his lips.

"Shhh," he whispered, and winked.

Sam's expression dropped into amazement. Coming to a conclusion and having it confirmed were two quite different things.

"God _damn,"_ he said at last. "What the hell happened between you and the Morlovs?"

Kobin had lost none of that languid tension. "You really want my fuckin' life story, Fisher?" he drawled.

"Yeah," said Sam, and his sincerity must have surprised them both. "I really do."

Kobin looked for a moment just as nonplussed as Sam felt, but he bit into the persimmon again and chewed for a thoughtful moment. "Alright, man, you asked for it," he said at last. He sat up straighter, put the remains of the persimmon down on a flight console, took his feet off the other chair. "I was born around here. Not Donetsk, down along the coast closer to Crimea. Tato was a local pilot, part-time smuggler." He shrugged. "All the border pilots were. Nothing serious, I mean, cigarettes, candy bars, blue jeans. Western junk. Tato brought it across and Ma sold it." Kobin held his hands out, palms flat, one over the other. "We had a little store on the corner, under the apartment. Ma ran it, really. Tato had no head for stuff like that, but he was good with people, so he made the deals and Ma kept the books. Things got rocky when the USSR started to crack, but people still wanted their Hershey bars and their Beatles tapes, so." His voice smoothed out, lost its inflections. "Then one day the cops come around, demand all the smokes in the store. Ma said that was ridiculous, she'd already paid their cut for the month. They shot her in the head." Kobin said it as if he were laying out their flight plan. "Just like that. Who does that?"

"I'm sorry," muttered Sam.

Kobin didn't seem to have heard him. "So then Tato went to the police, but it was cops who did it, so the chief just laughed. So the next time he came across the border, it wasn't candy bars under the cockpit floor. And then he walked into the police chief's office and shot him in the head. Like they did to Ma."

"But he was the Morlov boss in the town."

"How were we supposed to know? Not like he had a plaque on the door or something," complained Kobin. "So Grigor gives the order, down through the ranks: kill Petro Lashko. Bounty on his head. Pretty soon someone claims it. Ma's gone, Tato's gone, I have a little tiny store and an address book and Tato's favorite Piper Cub. So I do what I'm good at. I fly the plane, and I talk to people, and I make deals."

"Hang on," broke in Sam. "How old were you?"

"Shit, I don't remember," said Kobin. "Seventeen?" When Sam didn't respond, he continued. "Anyway, pretty soon I've got other people flying for me, and we're not moving cigarettes. The Morlovs take notice, which was the idea. They put me up against the wall, I say I'll join them, they let me in."

"And six years later you killed Grigor Morlov."

"Blew his head clean off," agreed Kobin proudly. "And stole his money, don't forget. Cold bastard loved it more than his life anyway. I thought it made a nice, you know, what do they call blood money in the US? Settlement. A nice settlement, for Tato." Kobin settled back into his chair and picked up his fruit again. "You know the worst part?" he said, jabbing it towards Fisher. "I knocked off a Russian kingpin and I've had to keep my mouth shut for nineteen years. Do you have any idea how much I would _love_ to brag about that?"

"It was nicely done," said Sam.

"Fisher. I'm blushing."

"Don't get carried away."

Kobin chewed and considered. One hand rose, for a brief moment, to tap at that spot at the base of his sternum. "He was a shitty father," he blurted out. "But he was _my_ shitty father, you know? And that Morlov guy just knocked him off like--" Kobin made a gun with two fingers, mimed a shot. "-- Bam. Just a problem to be solved. Principle of the fucking thing, or something. Anyway." He looked back at Fisher. "You get it, I know you do. People say that revenge doesn't solve anything, but I gotta tell you, I felt pretty good watching that son of a bitch die."

"A lot of people haven't ever had something worth avenging," said Sam.

"I was mad at Tato for a long time, but these days I mostly get it," said Kobin. "And it was for Ma. Plus Tato never really thought things through, sometimes he just did that kind of shit."

With great effort Sam kept his mouth shut on the matter of the Lashko family and impulsive decisions.

"Third question," he said instead. "This one's for all the marbles."

"I don't even know what these alleged marbles are," said Kobin with a flicker of sarcastic laugher.

"Why did you want to stay on Paladin?"

Kobin's vague cheer dropped instantly. "Who said I wanted to stay?"

"Kobin."

"Jeez, alright." He propped his feet up again. "You want me to be honest here?"

"If you can remember how to do that."

"I'll try. I'm not kidding, you know," he added more forcefully. "It takes effort. To just say the truth and not tailor it for whoever you're talking to."

"Make the effort."

"I will. I'm just warning you, because I don't think you're gonna like it."

"Stop stalling."

"Excuse me for being cautious, Commander Beatdown. Historically, being honest with you has gotten me punched in the face."

That stabbed something cold into Sam's chest. "I'm not going to-- Jesus. No. Andriy. I'm not going to hurt you."

"Yeah, well, I've got scars that say otherwise."

Sam dropped his head. "I wasn't thinking too clearly at the time," he muttered to the floor.

Kobin seemed to accept that for the moment. He turned the last piece of his persimmon over and over in his hand, considering. "There's two groups of people in the world, Fisher: the man with the gun and the man looking down the barrel. You never want to be on the wrong side of that."

Sam frowned and said, "That's not true."

"See, you can say that," said Kobin, sitting up and waving a finger at him. "Because you're the one holding the gun. The biggest gun around, as far as I could tell, after Third Echelon went down. So I planned to get while the getting was good." He slumped back down.

"At least, I did," he muttered at last.

Sam's heart lifted just a bit from a gloom he hadn't noticed it sink into. "Now?"

"Now, I don't know, man. That's me being honest, I can't explain it. If I were lying to you I'd make up some bullshit. But the truth is I don't fucking know and I wish I did," said Kobin. But then he tilted his head in apparent curiosity and said, "You know about revenge, Fisher. You know what it feels like to get to the end of it."

Sam's heart contracted in sudden pain, the tide of grief-guilt-rage unexpectedly loosed within him. Oh yes. He knew what it felt like to get to the end of it. He remembered that hollow sensation all too well. _But I had friends. I had family. I had people to remind me who I was without a mission._

"It took me a few years to figure it out," Kobin went on, "but one day I realized I hadn't thought past killing Grigor. Not seriously. I've never been too good at that. On some level I never expected to get out alive. So, when I did..." He shrugged, and that was a life right there, compressed into one movement.

It dawned on Sam all at once that Kobin had probably never told a single human being any of this. The man who had been interrogated a thousand times still had secrets left after all. 

"I owe you an apology," muttered Sam.

"Eh?"

"To you," said Sam a little louder. "The whole affair with Sarah's death, it was... You didn't have anything to do with it. But you're the only one walking around who was involved, except for Grim, and I can't..."

"Oh," said Kobin. But then he looked back and said, "Yeah, but she's fine, right?"

"Yeah."

"So, like, no harm no foul. Irving pulled it off."

"He made me think for three years that she was dead."

"Yeah, that was a shitty thing to do," agreed Kobin. He sat up again. "But, look, Fisher, I'm not exactly a therapist, but if you can sit here and have a civil conversation with a guy like me, I think you can forgive your best friend for doing what he had to do to protect you."

Sam looked away. He couldn't face Kobin right now. The man seemed to notice, too, because he averted his gaze and spoke as if he were addressing the empty chair. "I'm not a good person," he said matter-of-factly. "Never have been, never will be. Guess I missed the boat on that. And I think it'd be great if all you had to do were good things and it would all work out. But...sometimes you gotta do a little bad thing in order to do a big good thing. I can't do big good things. But I can do the little bad things. And that's what the world really runs on. Compromises. Negotiations. Deals. Irving knew that, I think. I think that was what I was for. Maybe that's why I'm here."

Memories clicked and realigned in Sam's head. Grim in the mess, saying, _He suffered, Sam._ His fingers crumpled up the edges of the envelope. And he remembered again that last recording Irving had left him, telling him the truth. How much did you have to care about someone to hurt them? How much did you have to love your country to kill for it?

"And, I mean, it did work out in the end, right?" continued Kobin, still talking to the empty air. "Your kid's fine. You're fine. Vic's fine. Tom Reed's dead, everyone knows what a shithead he was, and you fly around in a secret plane saving the world." He sat back and popped the last piece of persimmon into his mouth.

"Sometimes you gotta let the past be the past," he concluded.

"Yeah," said Sam in a hoarse voice. "Maybe."

Kobin didn't say anything, just stayed staring off into space the way he had been when Sam had come in. Lost in Mykhailo Lashko's life, maybe. Sam shook himself and stood up straighter.

"Well. That's three, then," he said.

"So I guess we're done for now," finished Kobin. He put his feet up again.

"Not yet," said Sam. He didn't need to take a deep breath or steady himself; he had been in a hundred situations more nerve-wracking than this, and he exerted control without thinking about it. He did, though, still hesitate a fraction, hearing Grim say _You can't take it back if you don't like the results._

 But sometimes you just had to trust your team.

He slit the manila envelope with his pocket knife and drew out the stack of documents. "This is yours," he said, and tossed Kobin a passport.

Kobin caught it in his lap, mildly startled. He flipped open the thick blue cover, tipped it sideways to read the ID. _Name: Michael Kolmogoro. Age: 43. Birthplace: Mariupol, Ukraine. Citizenship: US._

"Do I really look forty-three?" he asked, holding the passport's photo up next to his face. "Is it the grey?"

"The ID's official, but I'd advise against using it unless absolutely necessary," said Sam. "You can change the name if you want, some bureaucrat picked it."

"Lot of trouble for a cover," griped Kobin.

"It's real."

"Yeah, tell Charlie congrats," said Kobin as he flipped through the little booklet, testing the weight of pages, examining the engraving. "This is great work, really looks-- Wait. What?" Sam's words finally processed. He turned back to the first page. Reread the information, carefully this time, examined again the photograph. Looked up at Sam in slow and total disbelief. "'Real' as in, like... What are you saying?"

"As in, real."

Kobin still stared at him with a stunned expression. "Wait. So I'm a- what. I'm a US citizen now?"

"Technically, not till you sign it. Uphold Constitution, rights and privileges thereto, et cetera et cetera," said Sam. He found the next document in the pile. "Sorry to naturalize you without asking, but the law says we have to before this means anything." This time he tossed a cream-colored envelope onto Kobin's lap.

Kobin put the passport down on top of one of the panels like he thought it might shatter, picked up the envelope and tore through the flap. Unfolded the single sheet of paper within. The sunlight burned through it and cast the mirror shadows of words. He didn't say anything as he read, but Sam already knew what the letter with its big blue seal contained.

_From the Office of the President, Orders to Report: Fourth Echelon Special Task Force..._

When he reached the signature at the end Sam saw his eyes flick back to the beginning and run through it again. Kobin carefully refolded the letter. Then got up and stood in front of Sam, utterly calm.

"Fisher. I want you to be very clear about this," he said evenly.

"Publicly you no longer exist."

"That's been true since Libya."

"Secretly - top secretly, in fact - but legally, you are now an official US citizen, classified as a civilian contractor, assigned permanently to Fourth Echelon," continued Sam. "Same setup as Charlie. There's a contract and everything." He jerked a thumb towards the rest of the manila envelope's contents. "I made sure to get you one on paper, even, I know how you like your contracts."

Kobin didn't even glance towards it. Instead he kept staring at the letter, and when he spoke again Sam had to strain to hear his voice.

"So I... get to stay?" he murmured.

"Assuming you want to." _You have to,_ babbled Sam's thoughts, _you're not allowed to leave, you belong here, you're mine..._

Kobin looked up then and Sam became suddenly aware of a strange chord stretching out somewhere beyond hearing. "I do, though," he said in the same slow, soft, wondering voice. "I really do."

The atmosphere felt charged, electric. Sam should say something. He couldn't do anything but look back.

Kobin broke the stare first. He gave a slight, strained laugh and picked up the passport to read the info again. " 'March 25th'," he said, trying for casual. "That's not my birthday."

"When is?"

"Fuck if I remember," said Kobin. He closed the passport again and tossed it onto the left seat. "I guess it could be. Aw, wait, that's the day you got me out of Benghazi, isn't it?" Kobin grinned and looked back up. That tingling tension hadn't left the air. The hair wanted to stand up along the back of Sam's neck. All the nervousness he hadn't felt before filled his chest in a queer bright burst. "That's sweet, Fisher, I didn't think you remembered." Sam dug for a sarcastic retort, but Kobin was so close to him and watching him with those hazel eyes and that mischievous smile and all the words went out of his head so he looked away and muttered, "Yeah, well. Welcome to the good guys."

"Oh, I highly doubt that," said Kobin, and he had only a flash of motion before Kobin pulled Sam hard against him and kissed him.

It was brief and quick and hesitant, tasted of a giddy elation and jittering fear all at once; it lasted forever and Sam had no chance to react before Kobin let go and backed off a half-step, something brittle in his smile. "Had to do that at least once, man, the look on your--"

Sam shoved him against the wall hard enough to strike sound from the metal and kissed him like his life depended on it.

When they broke apart at last the first thing Kobin said was "Jesus, Fisher, you could've said something." Laughter ran barely contained beneath his words.

"I've been told I have problems communicating," muttered Sam.

Kobin did laugh at that, and settled his arms over Sam's shoulders. "Should've told you I stayed cause I thought you were hot," he whispered breathlessly, and oh, how sweet it was to be close enough to hear that.

Sam huffed out a breath, warm against his neck. "Am I the only sane person on this plane?"

"No, _Grim_ is the only sane person on this plane," said Kobin. Sam took the chance to tangle his fingers in dark blond hair, stroked his thumb along the pale grey streak at Kobin's temple. That looked good on him. That he wanted to do more of. And from the way Kobin leaned into the touch, he agreed.

"And it seems to be working out so far," he added with a sly smile, and so Sam had to kiss him again, just to show him what for. Kobin arced up against him in a taut curve, pressing into the kiss, pressing hungry against him; _warmth,_ thought Sam, remembering, and now the space where they touched seemed to burn.

Then Kobin abruptly pulled away. "Fisher, are there cams in here?" he said with sudden focus. His eyes narrowed. "There better not be cams in here."

"We don't have cams in here."

"Although we should maybe do this someplace with fewer important switches," mused Kobin.

"That's one option," said Sam, and let one hand slide up beneath the man's shirt to the small of his back, gripped him tight, and Kobin couldn't suppress a sharp moan as nails dug ever so slightly into his skin.

"Seriously, though, don't--" His breath hitched in the middle. "--break my plane, _shit."_

"Oh, it's your plane now?"

"Hell yeah it's my plane. You save something, you get to keep it. Isn't that the rule?"

"In that case, that makes you mine," growled Sam into his ear. _At least I don't think we have cams in here,_ he thought briefly, but then Kobin sighed and leaned into him and whispered _"yours,"_ and that was it for thinking.

* * *

"Pay up," announced Grim, wearing a rare gleeful smile.

"Oh my god, Grim. Oh my god," said Charlie sullenly.

"Un-fucking-believable," agreed Briggs. "Turn it off, Grim, that's something I'm never gonna be able to un-see." Grim killed Paladin's cockpit video feed with a wave and a wink.

"How the fuck," declared Charlie. "There is no way a rational human being could have called that one."

"I'm psychic," said Grim. "Pay up."

"I knew I shouldn't. I fucking knew I shouldn't. And yet," mourned Briggs.

Charlie tossed a sleek, elaborate handset onto the SMI, black and chrome, something that trailed glittering antennae. "I had to order that custom all the way from China!"

"Well, now you get to order another one."

"You better take good care of this," said Briggs, his expression deadly serious as he pushed his prize across to her.

"I will take excellent care of this," promised Grim as she strapped the Colt .45 in its holster to her right thigh.

"The boss and Andriy fucking _Kobin,"_ moaned Charlie. "There is no way."

"This is like some Sark and Vaughn shit," opined Briggs.

"What?" said Grim, baffled.

Charlie groaned. "Oh my god, we're gonna die."

* * *

Paladin was due for a routine service - "which you really want to do, Fisher, don't fuck around with mean times to failure" - and a series of upgrades that Kobin and Grim had spent entirely too much time gleefully fussing over. Sam was fairly certain that at one point there had been a serious discussion of carpet color, and this frightened him on a fundamental level. Changes to Paladin, though, meant they had to go to Frankfurt where the plane could be serviced by the clandestine services' cleared mechanics. There used to be a place in Kansas that Sam had liked a lot better, close enough that he could visit home while repairs were being made, but all the agencies had recently been forced to consolidate into one spot. Probably budget cuts. That reminded him that ugh, fiscal year-end was coming up in a month and a half, and he needed to find Ollie's spreadsheet. The President had assured him their allocation would stay the same, but he really should take a look at Fourth Echelon's budget anyway, Make sure all the right people were getting what they needed.

Later, though. Right now a line drawing of the Indian subcontinent dominated the main screen in ops. The SMI glowed with names, photographs, intercepts.

"Bottom line is, the Army hardliners have everything set up to stage a Kashmir border incident to provoke the Pakistanis," summarized Grim. "Then they use it as an excuse to escalate to a full shooting war and, in their minds, win the fight once and for all. All-out nuclear exchange."

"Wow," said Charlie. "This is straight-up Doctor Strangelove."

"We disrupt their staged incident, the whole plan falls apart," said Briggs. "Then we can flush out who's behind this."

Sam tapped the SMI to open a channel to the cockpit. "Kobin? Can you get us into Kashmir undetected?"

Pages rustled on the other end as Kobin put down his preflight checklist. _"Sure, it's only one of the most heavily monitored slices of airspace in the world. Let's land in the Korean DMZ while we're at it,"_ he bitched. _"'We'd have to come in through the mountains,"_ he added more seriously, after a moment's thought. _"Below the mountains, I mean."_

"That is incredibly unsafe," said Grim in slow amazement.

 _"Oh, well, you didn't say anything about_ safe."

"Can you do it?" asked Sam.

_"Give me a stopwatch and a map and I'll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows."_

"We should not have shown him that movie," muttered Charlie into his tablet.

"Try again, Andriy."

_"I gotta make a couple phone calls, but I'll get us in. Getting out again, that depends on how much noise you plan to make."_

"We'll try to keep it down." Sam turned to his technical operations director. "Well?"

"Go for Kashmir," summarized Grim.

"Go for Kashmir," agreed Sam. "Charlie?"

"Go for Kashmir."

"Go for Kashmir," said Briggs with a nod.

Sam tapped the glass again. "Kobin?"

 _"Go for Kashmir, man,"_ came the reply. _"Seat backs and tray tables in their upright and locked positions, kids."_ Paladin's massive engines roared to life. _"Let's go save the world."_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> And that's that! Thanks for coming along with me on this venture into a rather strange neck of the woods, fandom-wise. Read on if you're interested in some more detailed annotations of the text. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it.
> 
> I'm fond of the band Elbow's song "Grounds for Divorce," which you may recognize as the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer music. I put it on while writing and suddenly had this intense, vivid mental image of Kobin knocking someone down, grabbing their shotgun out of midair, and firing it straight into someone else. He wasn't allowed to kill Kostiuk in the end, but that image provided much of the impetus for the final combat sequence.
> 
> I had a lot of the idea for this story before Russia went and, erm, blatantly invaded Ukraine, so uh let's say this takes place in an alternate universe where they held off on that. It did give me a great way to draw Kostiuk in with the promise of nuclear weaponry, though.
> 
> It annoys me that they seem to forget entirely in the game that Kobin is Ukrainian, so I gave him a few more touches from his native land. His habit of listening to hard house is a nod to the married Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim, who are quite fond of it.
> 
> The chapter titles are from "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which I'm pretty sure Kobin has written rude comments in the margins of.
> 
> The show Briggs and Charlie are obsessed with is Alias, JJ Abrams' nineties spy show starring Jennifer Garner. It is ridiculous and ADD and thoroughly enjoyable.
> 
> "Give me a map and a stopwatch and I'll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows" is from The Hunt For Red October.
> 
> Leonid Kostiuk is my own creation, but he's cribbed directly from the real biographies of post-Soviet kleptocrats. Ditto Grigor Morlov and the Morlov syndicate, who are based on real Russian vory.
> 
> Thanks to [Stonhenge](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonhenge/) who fixed up my awful Google-translate Ukrainian into something a real person might say.
> 
> The RQ-275, tragically, does not exist; it's named after the American RQ-170 surveillance drone.
> 
> They really do train dolphins to plant mines on ships in Sevastopol.
> 
> [Link to story post on tumblr.](http://sundayswiththeilluminati.tumblr.com/post/105204277980/story-post-the-devil-you-know-splinter-cell)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Double Blind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4787279) by [Mertiya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya)
  * [White Russian Christmas](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5602762) by [Mertiya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya)




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